Electrohydrodynamic jet printing (e-jet printing) is a nascent additive manufacturing process most notable for its capacity for extremely high resolution printing and its ability to print fluids orders of magnitude more viscous than would be possible for established competing technologies such as inkjet printing. These capabilities make electrohydrodynamic jet printing promising for applications such as custom electronics and biotechnology fabrication. However, reliably fulfilling e-jet printing's potential for high resolution printing requires delicate control of the volume deposited by each jet. Such control is made difficult by a lack of models that both capture the dynamics of volume deposition and are compatible with the control schemes relevant to e-jet printing. This work delivers such a model. Specifically, this work introduces a definition of "droplet volume" as a dynamically evolving variable rather than a static variable, and uses this definition along with analysis of high speed microscope videos to develop a hybrid dynamical system model of droplet volume evolution. This model is validated with experimental data, which involves the contribution of a novel technique for extracting consistent droplet volume measurements from videos.


A Control-Oriented Dynamical Model of Deposited Droplet Volume in Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing

Division / Sponsors: 
Dynamic Systems & Control (DSCD)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/DSCC/DSCC2020/volume/84270

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