The contact problem in solid-ink printing

An analysis is made of the print-quality characteristics of multi-copy printing in which a rigid type font indents several layers of paper and carbon paper resting on a rigid platen. Particular attention is given to determining the contact-pressure distributions for two indenter shapes and for layers of various thicknesses. Stress distributions in the layers are computed and, using a stress-failure mechanism for solid ink, the stress distributions are found to agree well with opticalprint density and reflectance measurements obtained from experiments.