Enhanced Resolution, Throughput, and Stability of Aerosol Jet Printing via In Line Heating

Abstract

AbstractAerosol jet printing offers high resolution, broad materials compatibility, and digital patterning for flexible, conformal, and hybrid electronics. However, limited throughput, instability, and complex optimization requirements inhibit translation to industrial applications. An in‐line heater integrated on a custom printer is demonstrated to modulate droplet evaporation in the aerosol phase, thereby decoupling the deposition rate of functional solids and liquid ink to enable taller, narrower features with aspect ratios reaching 0.29 for a single line. Heating the printhead from room temperature to 80 °C reduced the sensitivity of resolution to deposition rate by ≈90%, improving reliability. With this strategy, increasing the linear deposition rate by 10x results in a modest increase of 27% in line width, compared to a four‐fold increase without heating, permitting higher throughput without sacrificing print quality. Providing a control for in‐line drying independent of ink formulation enables rapid, straightforward design of new materials and processes. This ability to engineer drying of droplets prior to impingement provides a versatile tool to meet complex fabrication challenges, as demonstrated here for both high aspect ratio printing and conformal patterning on rough and three‐dimensional surfaces.