Methods for active manipulation of fluid droplets

Sammanfattning: The deposition of functional materials utilising a jetting head has a large number of applications as can be seen by the growing interest in rapid prototyping. The ability to jet with precision and accuracy for high throughput application is at the core of the jetting technology. If this can be achieved at increasingly large altitudes over the substrate an increased portion of the business application space can be addressed, such as the ability to jet with smaller droplets, the ability to jet on complex PCB configurations, et cetera. A state of the art study is included in this project, which describes different potential methods that could be used for active manipulation of fluid droplets. In this project, two methods have been investigated for active manipulation of fluid droplets that could be implemented on the MY600 Jet Printer. The first method is based on using a converging air flow to focus the droplets towards the centre of a tube and thus reduce error positioning. From the simulations and analyses performed, it was concluded that this method was not suitable for implementation on the MY600 Jet Printer due to the excessively high air flow speed required to correct any misalignments. The second method investigated uses an electrostatic field to affect the positioning of charged droplets. From the performed experiments, it was concluded that the droplets can be affected by the electrostatic field, but that active charging of the droplets is necessary to achieve an adequate force required to correct any misalignments within a reasonable height.