8:25 AM - *SM08.01.04
Maneuvering and Printing Liquids by Means of a Pyro-Electrohydrodynamics—How Overcome the Current Limits of Micro- and Nanoscale Bio-Printing
Pietro Ferraro1,Veronica Vespini1,Romina Rega1,Simonetta Grilli1
Intelligent Systems CNR1
Show Abstract
Inkjet printing is a powerful enabling technology for formation of structures at micro and nanoscale for current mosto advanced fileds of appplications. As it is a direct fabrication approach, it has the undisputed advantage to avoid any masks, molds or lithography steps. Furthermore, in addition to this great flexibility, recently it has been demonstrated the capability of inkjet printing approaches to reach very high spatial resolution, down to nanoscale and over large area. Direct printing of micro and nano structures has been proofed with a variety of different inks and different types of materials. Different technologies exist, such as thermal jetting, piezo-based jetting, Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jetting, syringe-based pumping or simply contact-dispensing printing. Each of the above-mentioned technologies is based on liquid media to be delivered in the jet printing process. Moreover, most of the existing methods include needles for liquid dispensing. Unfortunately, the use of needles has some severe limitations such as clogging and cross contamination. Here it will be presented some recent developments about a novel and special platform based on EHD jetting driven by a pyroelectric effect activated in a bulk ferroelectric crystal. Waht we named Pyro-EHD exhibits significant potentialities in allowing liquid dispensing and printing for a number of applications ranging from microelectronics to biotechnologies. One of the interesting features is that pyro-EHD can easily work in nozzle-less modality thus avoiding needles and consequently the related clogging drawbacks. The pyro-EHD printer approach usually dispenses liquids from a liquid reservoir that can be a sessile droplet or even the free surface of a liquid. The high potentials easily attainable through the ignition of the pyroelectric effect allow to manouvering and dispense and print also high viscous polymers and liquids dropltes. Description of the pyro-EHD will be provided. The results obtained will be shown and discussed. Several examples will be illustrated for direct printing of liquids under both single and multiphase forms that can find useful exploitation in a multiplicity of fields from microelectronics to biomedical applications.
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