A New Approach to Quantify the Uniformity Grade of the Electrohydrodynamic Inkjet Printed Features and Optimization of Process Parameters Using Nature-Inspired Algorithms

Abstract

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) inkjet is one of the non-contact jet based promising technology to fabricate high-resolution features of functional materials with higher efficiency. Uniformity of the deposited droplets is one of the key demands of the EHD inkjet system for printing micro-features in microsensors, printed flexible electronics or various MEMS devices. In this study, a new methodology has been proposed to model the uniformity grade of the deposited droplets. In this present work, a significant improvement in the printing quality has been achieved with the help of some modern optimization methods coupled with some traditional statistical methods. Instead of a single fixed solution (may or may not be feasible), the proposed methodology suggests a feasible region with a large set of solutions. It extends the operators’ flexibility to choose from a wide range of input parameters which yield droplet depositions with higher uniformity. The proposed methodology is further evaluated with some experimental runs to fabricate discrete dots and continuous line patterns. This method is considered to be a promising and effective alternative offline approach to increase the uniformity of the droplets.