An inkjet printer for an Airbus
Have you ever wondered how they get those logos onto the sides of aircraft? Its surprisingly low-tech, but Airbus is building a jumbo sized ink-jet printer to take over the job.
Every airline has its own colour scheme, livery, elaborate designs on the tail fins, and logos along the outside of their aircraft. At present there are two ways of getting the logos on there. One is to print giant decals on heavy-duty sticky-backed plastic. It works reasonably well, but the plastic adds weight to the aircraft and increases air resistance, so it actually adds to fuel costs. The logos can rip or tear which also causes aerodynamic inefficiencies and requires expensive decal repairs. The alternative is to spray paint the designs by hand, usually in layers of colours, using templates and stencils, which gives an aerodynamically better result but is a skilled and labour-intensive process.
To address this problem, Airbus is developing a version of an ink-jet printer which will paint directly onto the aircraft components. Just like a desktop printer, the Airbus printer will be an inkjet using three colours of paint, yellow, cyan and magenta, plus black, and it prints in a line by line raster pattern to build up the final image. Unlike your desktop printer, this printer handles panels up to seven metres square and can print on components of any size or shape. Airbus expects to put the printers into production in 2015.
As well as the obvious cost savings, this method will be faster, more accurate, more consistent, uses less paint, and the single layer paint dries much faster meaning turnround time is much shorter. Just like any other inkjet, this printer will be able to print near-photographic quality imagery with a very wide range of colour tones and gradations which opens up many possibilities for brand managers to use much more sophisticated imagery.
29th September 2014