Despite their specific methodologies, all current noncontact printing techniques such as inkjet printing (IJP), involve the break-up of a liquid meniscus during the separation of the ink droplet from the bulk ink reservoir. Often, the break-up of a liquid meniscus results in the formation of one or more satellite droplet whose volumes are several orders of magnitude smaller than the primary droplet. Many attempts are directed to suppress or control the formation of satellite droplets because they blur the printing result. For the first time, a simple mechanism by which a single satellite droplet is exclusively formed and directed to the substrate by a gas stream while the primary droplet remains attached to a metal rod used for controlling the formation and break-up of the meniscus is reported. High printing resolution is demonstrated by satellite droplets printing (SDP) without the need for small orifices which are prone to clogging. Furthermore, the droplet generation from a large orifice enables SDP to handle viscous inks which has remained challenging for traditional IJP.
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.
In this letter, we report functions of surface roughening and fluorination on suppressing linear metal particle-induced spacer surface charge accumulation. An appropriate increase in spacer surface conductivity by short-term fluorination and roughening not only increases the metal particle lifting voltage, but also weakens the particle activation. The spacer surface charge shows reduced charge density in roughened spacer, while fluorination modification significantly suppresses the charge density on the spacer surface. For roughened and fluorinated samples, the decrease of surface charge density and the intrinsic lower electric field (due to an increase in conductivity) near the triple junction both contribute to a higher particle lifting voltage. The content in this letter provides an approach to effectively suppress the charge accumulation induced by linear metal particles.
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