Poly(Methyl Methacrylate) (PMMA) Nozzle Structure and Fabrication Optimization for Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) Nozzle Manufacture
X. Yang, J-L. Wang, Z-F. Yin and L. Li
Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet printing, which has down to nano-scale resolution, has been widely used in the field of thin film deposition, flexible electronic fabrication and solar cell production. However, this technique requires the nozzle should be disposable, since such small nozzle can hardly be cleaned and usually block issue occurs during printing of large particles. Laser etching is an effective technique to mass fabricate micro-scale structures with low cost and high efficiency. In this work, the laser etching and thermal bonding method were employed to fabricate low cost poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) nozzles. To improve the fabrication quality, the conditions for laser cutting and thermal bonding were optimized by orthogonal experiments. The numerical simulation for channel design was carried out and the influence of channel structure on the ink velocity and pressure distribution was studied. The tensile test indicated the high bonding strength of the nozzle, which meets basic requirement for EHD printing.
Keywords: CO2 laser, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet printing, laser etching, thermal bonding, orthogonal experiment, numerical simulation, optimization