Effect of Methods of Changing in Focusing Ratio on Line Geometry in Aerosol Jet Printing

Abstract

In this article, a study is presented of the effect of the focusing ratio (FR) on the line geometry in aerosol printing process. The FR was defined as the ratio of sheath flow to aerosol flow. The FR was varied from 1 to 20. In the experiment, different nozzles were used, with outlet diameter of 100, 150 and 300 μm. It was established that in increasing FR from 1 to 20 by reducing the aerosol flow with constant sheath flow rate, line width and thickness are reduced in more than 40 and 10 times respectively. It is also found that by increasing the FR from 2 to 8 by changing only sheath flow with constant aerosol flow rate, line width is reduced from 125 to 75 μm, while line thickness is increased from 7.1 to 10.3 μm. It is shown that this feature is related to the quantity of the matter deposited on the substrate, which is directly related to aerosol flow. The achieved result is important for designing current-carrying lines of electronic circuits which require a specific aspect ratio and high circuit element density