Development of a new thermal inkjet head with the virtual valve fabricated by MEMS technology

멤스기술을 이용한 가상밸브가 있는 새로운 잉크젯 헤드 개발

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%.