There is much activity on inkjet printing of functional materials, and many very impressive and encouraging results on a small scale have been shown. But the real applications for such achievements will generally require printing at a much larger scale, and there are many challenges in scaling a successful process at laboratory scale to a successful one at industrial scale.Inkjet printing is inherently scalable, which is a key advantage for solution processable P-OLEDs and their use in manufacturing large, commercially-relevant displays. But there are many aspects to consider in scaling up including time, process factors, dealing with large arrays of nozzles and large printers, and robustness.This paper addresses some of these issues, and raises awareness of others with particular reference to display printing - methods to combat swathe joins are still applicable, print strategies can be used to generate redundancy in arrays to mitigate lost nozzles or nozzle variations, and physical structures can be changed to makes processes more tolerant of drop misplacement.
Mark Crankshaw, Lee Foster, Alan Owens, Laura Webb, Eric Mayes, "From DMP to 40” TV – The Challenges of Scaling-Up Inkjet" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP25), 2009, pp 627 - 630, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2009.25.1.art00061_2