 Hi, this is Kaiwen from BCH. Today we're going to talk about the use of ultrasonic cleaner to unclog a printhead. An ultrasonic cleaner works wonders in unclogging printheads, especially the printheads clogged by pigment ink. The cleaner is extremely effective and very affordable. They can be found on eBay for about 30 to 100 dollars. However, there are many people saying that ultrasonic cleaner will destroy the printhead. So let's take a look at the ultrasonic cleaning process more carefully. Ultrasonic cleans the surface by cavitation, which the ultrasound creates a microscopic bubbles. When the bubbles burst like that and they will create a tiny vacuum, millions and millions of these bubbles will create a cleaning force and dislodge dirt and debris from the surface of whatever we are trying to clean. This process sounds very harmless. So how could it destroy the printhead? It turns out the vibration of the process is detrimental to the thin surface. If you have a thin membrane, it's probably going to get destroyed. Therefore, although ultrasonic cleaning is widely used in automotive, sporting, printing, marine, medical, pharmaceutical, electroplating, disk drive, engineering, and weapons, we shouldn't clean things like microphones, speakers, buzzers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes. Some of the printheads. In fact, one way to test the power of cleaning is called a foil test, which an ultrasonic cleaner will destroy a piece of aluminum foil in a matter of seconds. Many people are scared by the looking of the destroyed aluminum foil and conclude the process is very harmful for the printhead. Actually, the aluminum foil test is special because in addition to the physical forces of high frequency vibration and acoustic cavitation, there is also a sonochemical effect occurring that causes the molecular bound cleavage of the water molecule release powerful oxidizing hydrosil radicals. Because of the nature of aluminum, the effect is dramatic. Actually, the ultrasonic is very safe for electronic parts. As long as we know which one can be used and which one can. For printing industries, ultrasonic cleaning is widely used on printheads such as HP, Canon, Epson, Mimaki, Konica, Seiko, Nova. However, some of the printheads have thin membranes to divide in colors. Therefore, there are certain printheads that we shouldn't use the ultrasonic cleaner. When we decide if we want to try ultrasonic cleaning, we need to do plenty of research and only try on the kind of printhead that we can afford to lose. Here's an example of an ultrasonic cleaner destroyed a DX7. If you do know, DX7 is about $1,500 new and $500 used. It is clear that the vibration destroyed the ceiling membrane and we thank the author very much for trying that. And the shared result with that. However, don't believe everything you see on the Internet. For example, we'll give less weight on this information because the author didn't try it and only provided some speculations. Finally, we need to decide what kind of ultrasonic machine to use. Let's take a look at our plan here. If we use the following configuration, the ultrasonic force will clean the surface of the printhead. Also, if we fill up the printhead with liquid, such as ink or otherwise, the vibration will knock off some of the debris inside the nozzle. Therefore, the outside cleaning is done by vibration and cavitation. Cavitation, I mean bubbles. But the inside cleaning is only done by vibration. To make the bubbles inside, we want to have a smaller bubble, like in picture B. So, if a pigment is thick inside the nozzle, we can have both sonic wave and cavitation bubbles to dislodge it. Bubble size is determined by the ultrasonic frequency. The higher the frequency, the smaller the bubble. When we see this figure, most printhead size fits in the red band. Therefore, if we use a 48 kHz frequency, we can have the bubble small enough to fit in the largest nozzle. To make the cavitation bubbles work for all nozzles, we'll need about 75 kHz and a valve. However, most ultrasonic cleaners are 40 kHz and below. To get 75 kHz and up, you'll be expected to pay at least $1,000. Don't be discouraged by this information. We're talking about cleaning the nozzle hole. Although the nozzle opening is tiny, it immediately connects to a large funnel. The less expensive cleaners can still do a good job on the printhead. VCH carries some high-frequency cleaners. If I have a monitor burn and here's a good source, just go to the BCH website, go to accessories, and check the ultrasonic cleaner. The cheapest one is a little under $1,000. We're going to use a straight bolt, a regular 40 kHz cleaner. Then we need to decide how powerful we want to be. We want a 35-watt cleaner for $30 or 350 watts for $300. Fortunately, neither the bubble size nor the cavitation power is determined by the power of the cleaner. More powerful cleaners will have more bubbles and thus clean the surface quicker. However, we can just get a regular small size cleaner and doing just fine. Therefore, we can choose a small cleaner. If you are choosing a larger one, then you may be overcompensating something. We're going to use a Canon cartridge PG245. This cartridge is an integrated cartridge, which means it doesn't have a membrane or foils. We modified the original cartridge and made it a spongeless refillable cartridge. If you want to know how to do that, check out the link below in the comment section. Our market has a first printout, no cleaning. We use a little cleaner, really cheap cleaner we bought from eBay. You always want to use a basket to suspend your printout right on top of the bubbles. We did 10 in the first day, then we leave it overnight and this second day. We did 20 cleanings total and 90 seconds each cleaning. Let's check the result. Here's the result of 5 cleaning. And 20 cleanings. Let's zoom in and check out the really, really little details. Normally, size 2 is the limit of the inkjet can do. If you see the letters on the size 2, after 20 cleanings, they look much better. Okay, I know what you guys are going to say. You guys are going to say the little machine we use here is too small. And you want to see the high frequency machine. Okay, you got what you wish for. I don't really like the Stanley Steel basket. So I bought this cookie, I think it's cookie sheet or some kind of silicone pad from joint fabric. My plan is to cut a hole and use it as a floating platform. Those cartridges have a really nice angle, so I'll just sit like this so it won't rub the printhead on the Stanley Steel. We did 20 more cleanings, 3 minutes each. So the total clean time with this is an hour. So we cleaned this printhead 40 times. Use high power, low power, high frequency, low frequency. And so we conclude there's no way you can destroy the integrated cartridge with ultrasonic cleaning. We're looking at things at a very small scale. Let me compare to a commercial printout on the product page. So after 40 cleanings, the letters are still very sharp. So we think ultrasonic cleaning is safe for integrated cartridges. Integrated cartridge is like HP and Canon. They look like this, a little black square and have a printhead on them. Okay, I hope you enjoyed this video. Don't forget to subscribe and also visit us at www.bchtechnologies.com. Have a good day. Cheers.