Appeal No. 1998-1435 Page 2
Application No. 08/132,584
The inventive dryer uses heated, high velocity jets of
air to scrub and break up the moist air layer. More
specifically, high velocity air is heated as it flows along a
resistance heating element within an air delivery baffle tube.
Once heated, the air pressurizes a plenum chamber within an
air distribution manifold. High velocity jets of the hot air
are then discharged through multiple air flow apertures onto
the wet ink side of a
printed sheet as it moves through the dryer's exposure zone.
An
extractor removes the moist air layer and high velocity hot
air from the printed sheet and exhausts it from the press.
Claim 31, which is representative for our purposes,
follows:
31. A method for drying a freshly printed sheet
in a printing press comprising the steps:
installing first and second dryer heads in side-
by-side relation on the press in a position facing a
dryer exposure zone, the dryer heads being separated
from each other by a longitudinal air gap;
discharging heated, pressurized air from each
dryer head through the dryer exposure zone and onto
the freshly printed sheet; and
extracting the heated air from the exposure zone
through the longitudinal air gap.
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