1 research outputs found
Cell Filling in Gravure Printing for Printed Electronics
Highly scaled direct gravure is a
promising printing technique
for printed electronics due to its large throughput, high resolution,
and simplicity. Gravure can print features in the single micron range
at printing speeds of ∼1 m/s by using an optimized cell geometry
and optimized printing conditions. The filling of the cells on the
gravure cylinder is a critical process, since the amount of ink in
the cells strongly impacts printed feature size and quality. Therefore,
an understanding of cell filling is crucial to make highly scaled
gravure printed electronics viable. In this work we report a novel
experimental setup to investigate the filling process in real time,
coupled with numerical simulations to gain insight into the experimental
observations. By varying viscosity and filling speed, we ensure that
the dimensionless capillary number is a good indicator of filling
regime in real gravure printing. In addition, we also examine the
effect of cell size on filling as this is important for increasing
printing resolution. In the light of experimental and simulation results,
we are able to rationalize the dominant failure in the filling process,
i.e., air entrapment, which is caused by contact line pinning and
interface deformation over the cell opening