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Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology

Introduction

This project is part of the "Next Generation Inkjet Technology" consortium, which was established to study generic issues in industrial inkjet printing following the award of an EPSRC 5 year grant. The key objectives are to improve understanding, characterisation and modelling of fluid flow and fluid-nozzle interactions so that the inkjet process could be optimised. The partners on the project include several universities (Cambridge, Durham, Leeds, Manchester and Wales-Aberystwyth) and companies (Sunjet, Sericol, Xaar, FujiFilm, Domino, Inca, Linx and CDT).

The work on this project is concerned with the Rheological characterisation of inkjet fluids. We are aiming to established techniques to compare and measure the rheology of the relevant fluids at the very high shear rates of deformation experienced in inkjet printers. This work includes:

  • studying the rheology of inkjet fluids at very high shear rates using the MultiPass Rheometer (MPR)
  • investigating filament thinning profiles of inkjet fluids at wide range of imposed strain rates using the MPR filament stretching technique.
  • looking at the effect of fluid properties on filament profiles and subsequent droplet formation.
  • comparing and validating our results with that obtained from real inkjet printer heads.

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