• Journal of The Institute of Information and Telecommunication Facilities Engineering
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.30-35
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• 2009

In this paper, the type of inkjet heads and the control of head of inkjet printer are surveyed. The electronic parts of inkjet printer are composed of main- board and sub-board. The inkjet head is controlled by using these boards. The results from silver ink jetting experiment are given. The results show that the implemented inkjet system can give a satisfactory performance.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.757-758
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• 2009

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.124-129
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• 2010

For the industrial printing applications, the stability of the piezo-driven inkjet printhead is a major requirement. In this paper, we focused on the failure modes of the inkjet printhead and realized a method to detect and repair them at high speed. The printhead monitoring is performed by detecting the residual vibration of the actuating plate using the self- sensing capability of the piezoelectric material. To measure the channel acoustics and to identify the malfunctioning nozzle, we devised the bridge sensing circuitry and failure detection algorithm. The residual vibration signals can be affected by the boundary conditions of the channel acoustics, so it is possible to identify the failure causes by analyzing the monitoring signals. Therefore it is also possible to apply a proper restoring process to the defective printhead. The experimental results show that this method is effective in improving the reliability of the industrial printing.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.587-588
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• 2006

Drop-on-Demand (DOD) inkjet printing technology, especially piezo-typed, has been paid attention by industries due to its inherent nature of unbeatable material usage and low cost manufacturing cost. Despite of these key advantages over any other competing manufacturing technologies, the primary disadvantage has been considered as its limited capability to produce fine resolution patterns with a commercially available DOD inkjet print head. Although the main effort has been focused on the production of a DOD inkjet print head with smaller nozzles to overcome this challenging issue, an alternative approach could be taken and it would enable to expand the employment of DOD inkjet printing technology to applications requiring fine patterns further more.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.31 no.1 s.256
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• pp.51-61
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• 2007

This paper presents numerical and theoretical studies of acoustic wave interactions in slightly compressible liquids within piezoelectrically driven inkjet print heads. The interconnected flow channels may cause jet crosstalk, resulting in poor printing quality. It should be reduced by modifying the channel structure with the acoustic wave interactions considered. Compressible gas flow driven by the sudden movement of a top wall in the channel is calculated using Flow3D and is validated with the narrow gap theory. Limited compressibility model of the Flow3D is employed to calculate pressure waves of slightly compressible ink flow. It is found that reducing restrictor width can damp out the jet crosstalk by inhibiting the pressure wave propagation. The degree of crosstalk has been quantified using the maximum values of cross-correlations between neighboring channels and a critical channel dimension for acceptable crosstalk has been proposed. This finding is verified by drop visualization experiments using silicon-micromachined piezo inkjet print heads that are fabricated by our group.

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

• 한국가시화정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.128-133
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• 2007

An electrostatic inkjet head can be used for manufacturing processes of large display systems and printed circuit boards (PCB) as well as inkjet printers because an electrostatic field provides an external force which can be manipulated to control sizes of droplets. The existing printing methods such as thermal bubble and piezo inkjet heads have shown difficulties to control the ejection of the droplets for printing applications. Thus, the new inkjet head has been proposed using the electrostatic force. A numerical analysis has been performed to calculate the intensity of the electrostatic field using the Maxwell's equation. Also, experiments have been carried out to investigate the droplet movement using a downward capillary with outside diameter of $500{\mu}m$. Gravity, surface tension, and electrostatic force have been analyzed with high voltages for a drop-on-demand ejection. It has been observed that the droplet size decreases and the frequency of the droplet formation and the velocity of the droplet ejection increase with increasing the intensity of the electrostatic field using high-speed camera.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.30 no.10 s.253
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• pp.1003-1011
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• 2006

Droplets are ejected onto a substrate through a nozzle by pushing liquids in flow channels of drop-on-demand devices. The behavior of ejection and formation of droplets is investigated to enhance the physical understanding of the hydrodynamics involved in inkjet printing. The free surface phenomenon of a droplet is described using $CFD-ACE^{TM}$ which employs the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method with the piecewise linear interface construction (PLIC). Droplet formation characteristics are analyzed in various flow regimes with different Ohnesorge numbers. The computational results show that the droplet formations are strongly dependent on the physical properties of working fluids and the inlet flow conditions. In addition, the wetting characteristics of working fluids on a nozzle influence the volume and velocity of a droplet produced in the device. This study may provide an insight into how a liquid droplet is formed and ejected in a piezoelectric inkjet printing device.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.641-647
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• 2016

A drop-on-demand inkjet is used widely for various applications. Therefore, it is important to understand the jetting behavior of the drop from the piezo inkjet. In this study, to predict the jetting behavior, VOF (Volume-of-Fluid) simulation techniques were used and compared with the experimental results. The experimentally measured meniscus movement was used as the input data for the simulation. To verify the simulation, the measured jetting behavior of the mixture fluids of ethylene glycol and IPA (isopropyl alcohol), which has a mixing ratio of 50:50, was used. The numerical simulation of the drop formation using various mixture ratios and its comparison with the measured drop formation confirmed that the proposed method can predict the actual jetting. On the other hand, the satellite drop behavior showed slight differences because the small sized droplet is subject to a more aerodynamic effect during flight because the kinetic energy of the satellite droplet is far smaller than that of the main droplet.

• 유체기계공업학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.505-508
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• 2006

An electrostatic ink jet head can be used for manufacturing processes of large display systems and printed circuit boards (PCB) as well as inkjet printers because an electrostatic field provides an external force which can be manipulated to control sizes of droplets. The existing printing methods such as thermal bubble and piezo inkjet heads have shown difficulties to control the ejection of the droplets for printing applications. Thus, the new inkjet head using the electrostatic force has been proposed in this study. In order to prove the theory of the developed electrostatic ink jet head, the applicable and basic theory has been studied using distilled water and water with sodium dodecyl surfate (SDS). Also, a numerical analysis has been performed to calculate the intensity of the electrostatic field using the Maxwell's equation. Furthermore, experiments have been carried out using a downward glass capillary with outside diameter of $500{\mu}m$. The gravity, surface tension, and electrostatic force have been analyzed with high voltages of 0 to 5kV. It has been observed that the droplet size decreases and the frequency of the droplet formation and the velocity of the droplet ejection increase with increasing the intensity of the electrostatic field. The results of the experiments have shown good agreement with those of numerical analysis.