Inkjet Printing in Liquid Environments

Yanzhen Zhang; Dege Li; Yonghong Liu; Gunther Wittstock

doi:10.1002/smll.201801212

Inkjet Printing in Liquid Environments

Small. 2018 Jul;14(27):e1801212. doi: 10.1002/smll.201801212. Epub 2018 May 28.

Authors

Yanzhen Zhang¹, Dege Li², Yonghong Liu², Gunther Wittstock¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Mathematics and Science, Center of Interface Sciences, Institute of Chemistry, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, D-26111, Oldenburg, Germany.
² College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China University of Petroleum, 266580, Qingdao, China.

PMID: 29808593
DOI: 10.1002/smll.201801212

Abstract

Inkjet printing (IJP) is an old but still vivifying technique for flexible and cost-effective printing of various kinds of functional inks. Normally, IJP can only work in gaseous environments. Here, it is shown that traditional piezoelectric IJP can be performed in liquid environments with a totally different droplet dispensing and manipulating mechanism. With the same piezoelectric nozzle, the volume of the droplets printed in a carrier liquid can be thousands of times smaller than those printed in air. Therefore, this work demonstrates a working mode of traditional IJP with a highly improved resolution opening possibilities for novel applications of the IJP technique.

Keywords: dispenser; drop-on-demand; femtoliter; inkjet printing.