Inkjet technology has been used as a manufacturing tool for printed electronics. To increase productivity, the jetting frequency needs to be increased. When using high frequency jetting, the printed pattern quality can be non-uniform since jetting performance, including jetting speed and droplet volume, can vary significantly according to the jet frequency increase. Therefore, high frequency jetting behavior must be evaluated properly for performance improvement. However, it is difficult to measure high frequency jetting behavior using the previous vision analysis methods because subsequent droplets are very close and can even merge. In this paper, we present vision measurement techniques to evaluate the drop formation of high frequency jetting. The proposed method is based on the tracking of target droplets, and other subsequent droplets can therefore be excluded in the image analysis by focusing on the target droplet.
Kye-Si Kwon, Min-Hyuck Jang, Hyun-Seok Ko, "Tracking based inkjet measurement for evaluating high frequency ink jetting" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP30), 2014, pp 171 - 175, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2014.30.1.art00042_1