ABSTRACT
The modern office is filled with printers, copiers, scanners, fax machines, tape drives, and other machines that handle very flexible sheets and webs. The marketplace for such devices is highly competitive and, thus, designers must continually strive for increased speed, precision, and automation in the handling of paper sheets, magnetic tapes, and other flexible media. This presents both design opportunities and design challenges. The flexibility of paper, for example, makes it possible for the sheet to follow a circuitous path in a small amount of space, but it also makes the sheet vulnerable to a paper-jam. Likewise, a thin magnetic tape can use self-entrained air to lubricate its passage around a post, but air entrainment during roll-winding causes poor stacking of the laps. This chapter addresses some of the basic mechanical and tribological issues that affect the handling of flexible media in information processing systems. Specifically, it explores the following topics.
