Degradation Causes and Life Estimation of Thermal Printing Heads

Long lifetime is a base for thermal printing heads to be applied widely. Experiments on these thermal printing heads include high temperature storage tests, shaking tests, pulse-heat tests, and actual thermal printing tests. From the experiments, five degradation modes of thermal printing heads are summarized. The degradation reasons for the five modes are analyzed and the means of increasing the lifetime of thermal printing heads are demonstrated.