• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
• /
• v.26 no.9
• /
• pp.143-147
• /
• 2009

Inkjet printing makes use of ink droplets to form required patterns on a substrate. In order for the inkjet technology to produce reliable patterning tools, the jetting performance needs be controlled precisely. For controlling ink jetting performance, input waveform should be properly designed. In the past, the research was focused on designing dwell time of the input waveform for controlling jetting speed. However, the jetting performance is also closely related to rising and falling time. In this study, the effect of the rising and falling time on droplet speed will be investigated by measuring the droplet speed. In this study, the power OP amp (PA98A) was used in order to drive piezo inkjet head by amplifying the waveform generated from arbitrary function generator. The experimental results show that change of rising and falling time in the waveform not only affect the droplet speed but also optimal dwell time.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.9-13
• /
• 2008

The reproducibility of water droplet formation which is indispensible in the investigation of a drop-on-demand piezoelectrically driven inkjet was verified by checking the size of droplet and distance from the nozzle tip of inkjet head to droplet. Based on the reproducibility of droplet formation, we visualized the formation of micro-scale droplets by acquiring consecutive images at the jetting frequency of 500 Hz for which air bubbles were not generated. Two different electric waveforms were used to drive the piezoelectric actuator. The visualization system consists of a high-speed camera that can capture images up to 250,000fps, a long-distance microscope and a halogen lamp as a light source.

• Proceedings of the Materials Research Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 2011.05a
• /
• pp.3.2-3.2
• /
• 2011

In recent years, inkjet printing technology has received significant attention as a micro/nanofabrication technique for flexible printing of electronic circuits and solar cells, as well for biomaterial patterning. It eliminates the need for physical masks, causes fewer environment problems, lowers fabrication costs, and offers good layer-to-layer registration. To fulfill the requirements for use in the above applications, however, the inkjet system must meet certain criteria such as high frequency jetting, uniform droplet size, high density nozzle array, etc. Existing inkjet devices are either based on thermal bubbles or piezoelectric pumping; they have several drawbacks for flexible printing. For instance, thermal bubble jetting has limitations in terms of size and density of the nozzle array as well as the ejection frequency. Piezoelectric based devices suffer from poor pumping energy in addition to inadequate ejection frequency. Recently, an electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing technique has been suggested and proposed as an alternative to thermal bubble or piezoelectric devices. In EHD jetting, a liquid (ink) is pumped through a nozzle and a strong electric field is applied between the nozzle and an extractor plate, which induce charges at the surfaces of the liquid meniscus. This electric field creates an electric stress that stretches the meniscus in the direction of the electric field. Once the electric field force is larger than the surface tension force, a liquid droplet is formed. An EHD inkjet head can produce droplets smaller than the size of the nozzle that produce them. Furthermore, the EHD nano-inkjet can eject high viscosity liquid through the nozzle forming tiny structures. These unique features distinguish EHD printing from conventional methods for sub-micron resolution printing. In this presentation, I will introduce the recent research results regarding the EHD nano-inkjet and the printing system, which has been applied to solar cell or thin film transistor applications.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 2006.07b
• /
• pp.787-790
• /
• 2006

This paper analyzes the principle and feature of the piezoelectric ceramic print head for the image printing of industrial inkjet plotter, and apply the Drop-on-Demand method that can adjust an ink drop size in accordance with the certain time adjustment. In order to do this study, drive frequency is selected at maximum 8.3[kHz] which can be operated within resonance frequency range of the piezoelectric ceramic. Drop controlling was realized according to pulse waveform the drive voltage, and grey-scale and satellite diminution method were applied for printing of high resolution image. A feasibility study of the result will be demonstrated by constructing the experiment equipment.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
• /
• v.56 no.8
• /
• pp.1441-1444
• /
• 2007

This paper presents a novel electrostatic drop-an-demand ejector with a conductive pole inside nozzle. The MEMS fabricated pole-type nozzle shows a significant improvement in the performance and reliability of forming meniscus and generating a micro dripping mode of droplet out of the meniscus. It is verified experimentally that the use of the pole-type nozzle. The liquid is used D20+SDS+SWNT (5 %wt). The gap between upper electrode and nozzle is about 600 um. Electrostatic drop-an-demand ejection is observed when a DC voltage of 1.5 kV is applied between the control electrode and ground electrode. Droplet diameter is $100{\mu}m$.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.798-807
• /
• 2004

A testing system was developed to improve the reliability of printhead and several printheads were tested. We developed a thermally driven monolithic inkjet printhead comprising dome-shaped ink chambers, thin film nozzle guides, and omega-shaped heaters integrated on the top surface of each chamber. To perform a fatigue test of an inkjet printhead, the testing system automatically detects a heating failure using a Wheatstone bridge circuit. Various models were designed and tested to develop a more reliable printhead. Two design parameters of the width of reinforcing layer and heater were investigated in the test. Specially., the reinforcing layer was introduced to improve the fatigue life of printhead. The life-span of heater with a reinforcing layer was longer than that without a reinforcing layer. The wider the heater was, the longer the life of printhead was.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
• /
• 2003.11a
• /
• pp.1892-1897
• /
• 2003

A new thermal inkjet printer head on SOI wafer with virtual valve was proposed. It was composed of two rectangular heaters with same size. So we could call it T-jet(Twin jet). T-jet has a lot of merits. It has the advantage of being fabricated with one wafer and is easy to change the size of chamber, nozzle, restrictor and so on. However, above all, It is the best point that T-jet has a virtual valve. And it was manufactured on SOI wafer. The chamber was formed in its upper silicon whose thickness was 40um. The chamber's bottom layer was silicon dioxide of SOI wafer and two heaters were located underneath the chamber's ceiling. And the restirctor was made beside the chamber. Nozzle was molded by process of Ni plating. Ni was 30um thick. Nozzle ejection test was performed by printer head having 56 nozzles in 2 columns with 600NPI(nozzle per inch) and black ink. It measured a drop velocity of 12m/s, a drop volume of 30pl, and a maximum firing frequency of 12KHz for single nozzle ejection. Throwing out the ink drop in whole nozzles at the same time, it was observed that the uniformity of the drop velocity and volume was less than 4%.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 2006.07c
• /
• pp.1621-1622
• /
• 2006

This paper presents the effect of driving waveform for piezoelectric bend mode inkjet printhead with optimized mechanical design. Experimental and theoretical studies on the applied driving waveform versus jetting characteristic s were performed. The inkjet head has been designed to maximize the droplet velocity, minimize voltage response of the actuator and optimize the firing frequency to eject ink droplet. The head design was carried out by using mechanical simulation. The printhead has been fabricated with Si(100) and SOI wafers by MEMS process and silicon direct bonding method. To investigate how performance of the piezoelectric ceramic actuator influences on droplet diameter and droplet velocity, the method of stroboscopy was used. Also we observed the movement characteristics of PZT actuator with LDV(Laser Doppler Vibrometer) system, oscilloscope and dynamic signal analyzer. Missing nozzles caused by bubbles in chamber were monitored by their resonance frequency. Using the water based ink of viscosity of 4.8 cps and surface tension of 0.025N/m, it is possible to eject stable droplets up to 20kHz, 4.4m/s and above 8pL at the different applied driving waveforms.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 2007.07a
• /
• pp.1542-1543
• /
• 2007

This paper presents the effect of driving waveform for piezoelectric bend mode inkjet printhead with optimized mechanical design. Experimental and theoretical studies on the applied driving waveform versus jetting characteristics were performed. The inkjet head has been designed to maximize the droplet velocity, minimize voltage response of the actuator and optimize the firing frequency to eject ink droplet. The head design was carried out by using mechanical simulation. The printhead has been fabricated with Si(100) and SOI wafers by MEMS process and silicon direct bonding method. To investigate how performance of the piezoelectric ceramic actuator influences on droplet diameter and droplet velocity, the method of stroboscopy was used. Using the water based ink of viscosity of 11.8 cps and surface tension of 0.025N/m, it is possible to eject stable droplets through 64 nozzles average velocity of 4.05 m/s with standard deviation of 0.06 m/s and average diameter of $29.2\;{\mu}m$ with standard variation of $0.5\;{\mu}m$.

• 한국전산유체공학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2003.10a
• /
• pp.113-115
• /
• 2003

Droplet impinging into a cavity at micro-scale is one of important fluidic issues for microfabrications, e.g. bio-chip applications and inkjet deposition processes in the PLED panel manufacturing. The droplets generally dispensing from an inkjet head, which contains an array of nozzles, have a volume in several picoliters, while each nozzle jets the droplets into cavities with micron-meter size located on substrates. Due to measurement difficulties at micro-scale, the numerical simulation could serve as an efficient and preliminary way to evaluate the micro-sized droplet impinging behavior into a cavity. The micro-fluidic flow is computed by solving the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations through a finite volume discretization. The droplet front is predicted by a volume-of-fluid approach, in which the surface tension is modeled as a function of the fluid concentration. This paper discusses the influence of fluid properties, such as surface tension and fluid viscosity, on micro-fluidic characteristics at different jetting speeds in the deposition process via the proposed numerical approach.