A Study on Critical Pulse Conditions for Single-Droplets Generation in Drop-on-Demand Technique

Abstract

Generating single-droplets is significant for extensive applications of drop-on-demand (DoD) type of piezoelectric inkjet technique (PIT). Based on the mechanism of DoD technique, we theoretically analyze the effects of pulse parameters on the process of droplet generation, and the critical pulse conditions for generating single-droplets are obtained. With a single-droplet generator (SDG) fitted from an inkjet print-head based on DoD technique, we found that upper and lower limit of pulse amplitude for generating single-droplet both changes periodically with pulse width. As the critical pulse width increases, the lower limit has an exponential growth approximately, which is consistent with the theoretical consideration.