Droplet Ejection and Experimental Study on the Application of Industrial Inkjet Printhead

산업용 잉크젯 프린트헤드 액적 토출현상의 실험적 해석

In this paper, a hybrid design tool combining one-dimensional(1D) lumped model and three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics(CFD) approach has been developed in order to evaluate the performance of inkjet print head and droplet control process are studied to reduce the deviations between nozzles which affect the size of the printed line for the industrial application of direct writing on printed circuit boards(PCB). 1D lumped model analysis shows that it is useful tool for evaluating performance of an inkjet head by varying the design parameters. The differences in ejected volume and droplet velocity between analytical and experimental result are within 12%. Time sequence of droplet generation is verified by the comparison between 3D analysis result and photographic images acquired by stroboscopic technique. In addition, by applying DPN process, velocity and volume uniformity between nozzles is dramatically improved that the tolerance achieved by the piezoelectric inkjet printhead across the 64 nozzles is 5 to 8%. A printed line pattern is successfully obtained using the fabricated inkjet print head and droplet calibration system.