Work

Enhanced droplet volume of material jetting based on bipolar waveform optimization

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Fiercer requirements are put forward for the droplet jetting efficiency with the increasing application demand of piezoelectric inkjet technique in additive manufacturing . However, the progress of existing studies on promoting droplet jetting efficiency is restricted by their difficulty in achieving large scale droplet volume increase, with the maximum droplet volume limited to about 8 times the native droplet volume. Herein, a new droplet volume enhancing method was proposed based on bipolar waveform optimization, in which a bottom-up modular optimization method was applied according to the superposition characteristics of flow field oscillation inside the piezoelectric printhead system. More importantly, this method focused on the multi-droplet merging characteristics driven by multi-pulse waveforms, with the aim of realizing significant increase in droplet volume. The experimental results have shown that the newly designed waveform achieves stable droplets with the maximum-to-native volume ratio above 50, i.e., nearly six times above current levels. Hence, this work contributes a new perspective to droplet jetting efficiency.

Source: Journal of Manufacturing Processes

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmapro.2025.03.032