A Vector Printing Method for High-Speed Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) Jet Printing Based on Encoder Position Sensors

Abstract

Electrohyrodynamic (EHD) jet printing has been widely used in the field of direct micro-nano patterning applications, due to its high resolution printing capability. So far, vector line printing using a single nozzle has been widely used for most EHD printing applications. However, the application has been limited to low-speed printing, to avoid non-uniform line width near the end points where line printing starts and ends. At end points of line vector printing, the deposited drop amount is likely to be significantly large compared to the rest of the printed lines, due to unavoidable acceleration and deceleration. In this study, we proposed a method to solve the printing quality problems by producing droplets at an equally spaced distance, irrespective of the printing speed. For this purpose, an encoder processing unit (EPU) was developed, so that the jetting trigger could be generated according to user-defined spacing by using encoder position signals, which are used for the positioning control of the two linear stages.