Dynamic Contact Performance of Rubber Materials for Designing Wiper Blades

A printer assembly consisting of a pen, wiper with two blades, and wiper blade holder is investigated in this study. The two wiper blades press onto the pen surface via proper dimension interference, while wiping across the pen at a certain speed. A finite element model (FEM) was set up with ANSYS-LSDYNA. The hyper-elastic rubber wiper blades are described by Christensen's model with n = 1 for the strain energy density function. Dynamic contact forces between the wiper blades and the pen, number of contacts, and the duration of the wiper blades jumping over the pen are numerically simulated. Effects of the mechanical properties of the rubber materials, i.e., the coefficient of the Christensen's model, C₁₀, on the dynamic contact performance are investigated. The wiper blades are found to periodically touch and jump off from the pen. For the contact between the front blade and the pen, results show that the average contact forces and the number of the contact will increase with C₁₀, and for the back wiper blade there exist the same conclusions, except that the jumping duration of the back wiper blade does not decrease steadily, but shows a minimum. These results suggest that a new design with two curved sides of the blade tip could be beneficence.