Waasdorp Rick, van den Heuvel Oscar, Versluis Floyd, Hajee Bram, Ghatkesar Murali Krishna
Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering, Delft University of Technology Mekelweg 2 2628CD Delft The Netherlands
RSC Adv. 2018 Apr 18;8(27):14765-14774. doi: 10.1039/c8ra00756j.
Desktop inkjet printers are ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive among the variety of available printers. These inkjet printers use an array of micro fluidic pumps, nozzles based on piezoelectric actuation, to dispense individual picoliter volume ink droplets at high speed. In this paper, we show that individual pumps in desktop printers can be accessed to dispense droplets on demand. Access was obtained using the printer's command language programming. A detailed description of the access procedure is discussed. Droplets were printed on a paper as it rolled underneath the printhead, and with a minor hardware modification, they were also printed on a glass substrate. With this access, individual droplets were deposited, the smallest having an average diameter of 62 μm with a standard deviation of 6.9 μm, with a volume of ∼4 pL. From the intended position, the droplets had a standard deviation of 5.4 μm and 8.4 μm in the vertical and horizontal directions, respectively. The ink droplets were dispensed at a rate of 7.1 kHz. A circularity factor of 0.86 was obtained indicating that the dispensed droplets are of good quality. By replacing the ink in the cartridges with liquids of choice ( cells, proteins, nanoparticles ), we believe it provides an opportunity for low-cost, high-speed, high-precision, picoliter volume printing for a variety of applications.
桌面喷墨打印机随处可见，在各种可用打印机中相对便宜。这些喷墨打印机使用一系列基于压电驱动的微流体泵和喷嘴，以高速喷出单个皮升体积的墨滴。在本文中，我们展示了可以访问桌面打印机中的单个泵以按需喷出墨滴。通过使用打印机的命令语言编程实现了访问。讨论了访问过程的详细描述。墨滴在纸张从打印头下方滚动时打印在纸上，并且通过进行微小的硬件修改，它们也被打印在玻璃基板上。通过这种访问方式，可以沉积单个墨滴，最小的墨滴平均直径为62μm，标准偏差为6.9μm，体积约为4皮升。从预期位置来看，墨滴在垂直和水平方向上的标准偏差分别为5.4μm和8.4μm。墨滴以7.1kHz的速率喷出。获得的圆度因子为0.86，表明喷出的墨滴质量良好。通过用选定的液体（细胞、蛋白质、纳米颗粒）替换墨盒中的墨水，我们相信它为各种应用提供了低成本、高速、高精度、皮升体积打印的机会。
