Inkjet printing - the physics of manipulating liquid jets and drops

By G. Martin, S. Hoath, I. Hutchings. 2008

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last 30 years inkjet printing technology has been developed for many applications including: product date codes, mailing shots, desktop printing, large-area graphics and, most recently, the direct writing of materials to form electronic, biological, polymeric and metallic devices. The new non-graphical applications require higher print rates, better resolution and higher reliability while printing more complex, non-Newtonian and heavily solids-loaded liquids. This makes the understanding of the physics involved in the precise manipulation of liquid jets and drops ever more important. The proper understanding and control of jet formation and subsequent motion of the jetted materials requires physical studies into material properties at very high shear rates, acoustic modes in print heads, instabilities of jets, drop formation, drop motion, stretching of fluid ligaments, the role of polymers in jet break up, electrical charging of drops and the aerodynamic and electrostatic interaction of jets and drops in flight. Techniques for observation, measurement and analysis are evolving to assist these studies. This paper presents some examples of the application of physics to understanding and implementing inkjet printing, including recent work at the Cambridge Inkjet Research Centre.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08f5be462f699a32cf7781767361b325c479952f

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In Computational Mechanics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Additive Manufacture of Ceramics Components by Inkjet Printing (2015, methodology): “[16] with permission from the Institute of Physics)”
Inkjet and inkjet-based 3D printing: connecting fluid properties and printing performance (2017, unknown): “The exact shape of the drop is described by the Bashforth and Adams (1883) equation, which Figure 2 (a) Basic principles of CIJ; (b) DOD printers (Martin et al., 2008); (c) process diagram of powder-bed based 3D printing, where a binder is jetted onto a powder bed to create 3D objects (Sachs et al.”
The dynamics of the piezo inkjet printhead operation (2010, background): “Wewill only see the reproducible part of the drop formation, because the images are integrated over many (depending on the DOD frequency up to several hundred) droplets, recorded at a certain time interval after the start of the actuation [113,114].”
Inkjet Printing of Functional and Structural Materials: Fluid Property Requirements, Feature Stability, and Resolution (2010, background): “DOD printing operates at typical acoustic frequencies in the range 1 – 20 kHz, hence, given that the dimensions of the fluid filled chambers used to generate drops have dimensions of the order of 10 m, significant acoustic resonances can influence drop volume and velocity (12; 13) and thus the shape”