Evaluation of jet performance in drop-on-demand (DOD) inkjet printing

Inkjet printing has been widely used in many applications and has been studied for many years. However, there are not many systematic researches on the mechanism of jet formation, nor is there any reliable platform that enables us to evaluate jet performance. In this study, an approach to practically evaluate the jet stability of the dropon-demand (DOD) inkjet printing has been proposed, based on which the transient behavior of the DOD drop formation has been studied experimentally for Newtonian liquids with a range of different viscosities (1.0–11 cp) but of a comparable surface tension. For more viscous liquids, the rate of the jet retraction after a pinch-off from the nozzle was found to increase as the thread motion became more sharp and conical as a result of the shape effect. The break-up time of the jet also increased because the rate of capillary wave propagation was lower for more viscous liquids. The jet stability graph, which can be drawn in terms of jet retraction and break-up time, was employed to characterize the jetting stability, and the degree of satellite drop generation was quantitatively evaluated by two critical jet speeds. The effect of an electric pulse imposed on a piezoelectric plate inside the printhead was also studied. The single-peak electric pulse was used in this experiment for simple analysis, and the jet speed variation was measured under different operating conditions. Both the optimal dwell time and the maximum stable jetting frequency were affected by viscosity and they were explained in terms of the propagation theory.