Fabrication of electrical devices on conformal surfaces based on array nozzle and five-axis motion mechanism

Abstract

It has been known that conformal printing with a single nozzle has low efficiency. This study proposes a novel non-expandable curved surface printing method that could realize high-efficiency printing with array nozzles. First, based on the non-uniform rational B-splines curved surface reconstruction method, the parameter equation of the stereolithography format curved surface model is obtained. An equidistant parallel curve filling method is proposed based on the parameter equation. According to the filling accuracy, a spatial equidistant curve network model is established by fitting the surface. Using each node on the curve network as the filling pixel increases the filling rate of the non-expandable surface and improves the printing accuracy. Compared with that of the traditional equidistant filling, the droplet filling rate could be increased by 13.05 % in this study. Finally, based on the self-developed five-axis curved surface inkjet printing system and normal vector printing method, samples of concave, convex, and multi-material conformal surfaces are sequentially printed. Our research finding lays the foundation for high-efficiency integrated molding of electronic devices with complex conformal surfaces.