A high speed electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet printing method for line printing

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet printing has drawn attention due to its capability to produce smaller dots and patterns with finer lines when compared to those obtained from using conventional inkjet printing. Previous studies have suggested that drop-on-demand EHD-patterning applications should be limited to very slow printing cases with speeds far less than 10 mm s⁻¹ due to the small dot size and limited jetting frequency. In this study, a new EHD printing method is proposed to significantly increase the line-patterning printing speed by modifying the ink and thereby changing the relic shape. The proposed method has the additional advantage of reducing the line-pattern width. The results of the experiment show that the pattern width could be reduced from 20 µ m to 4 µ m by increasing the printing speed from 10 mm s⁻¹ to 50 mm s⁻¹, respectively. (paper)