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International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Technology (IJMET)
Volume 10, Issue 03, March 2019, pp. 1326
 – 
1338, Article ID: IJMET_10_03_134 Available online at http://www.iaeme.com/ijmet/issues.asp?JType=IJMET&VType=10&IType=3 ISSN Print: 0976-6340 and ISSN Online: 0976-6359
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A NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND VALIDATION STUDY OF THE MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF DROPLET FORMATION IN DROP ON DEMAND INKJET PRINTER AND THE EFFECT OF RHEOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF POLYMERINK FOR AUTOMOBILE LIGHTING APPLICATION
Rajesh.P.K., and Aravindraj.S
Department of Automobile Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu. India.
ABSTRACT
 A majority of the modern inkjet printers utilise drop on demand devices because of its precision in terms of time and easy control. The time-dependent fluid interface disruption renders the fluid dynamics process during droplet ejection complex. The current work attempts to provide an idea of the drop ejection behaviour based on the computation of energies required for droplet formation and splat formation. The  simulation results for various nozzle diameters with different polymer inks are examined and it is validated with computational model. Further attempt is made to analyse the effect of rheological properties like viscosity and surface tension in the droplet  formation.
Key words:
 Drop on demand; inkjet; droplet ejection; viscosity; surface tension. 
Cite this Article:
 Rajesh.P.K. and Aravindraj.S, A Numerical Simulation and Validation Study of the Mathematical Model of Droplet Formation in Drop on Demand Inkjet Printer and the Effect of Rheological Properties of Polymerink for Automobile Lighting Application,
 International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Technology
 10(3), 2019, pp. 1326
 – 
1338. http://www.iaeme.com/IJMET/issues.asp?JType=IJMET&VType=10&IType=3
1. INTRODUCTION
There is a tremendous efforts in the search for new means of further improving the quality and reducing device cost of ink jet printing due to its rapid growth over manufacturing of automotive electronics. Knowledge in fluid dynamic process of drop formation and drop ejection takes precedence in research and development of new ink jet print heads. There are
 
Rajesh.P.K. and Aravindraj.S
 
http://www.iaeme.com/IJMET/index.asp 1327 editor@iaeme.com
two main types of ink jet devices, namely, continuous
 – 
 jet type and drop-on demand type. [3 - 4]. In a continuous-jet device, there is a disintegration into a train of drops of the liquid, emerging from the nozzle continually in the form of a jet. The amount of electric charge on each individual drop and direction of motion of each drop from the continuous jet require sophisticated electrical signals. A drop-on-demand device, on the other hand, uses electrical signal to control the actuation at the instance of the ejection of an individual drop. Due to its  basic simplicity, the drop-on-demand type is common in the most modern ink jet printers. This work focuses on the basic drop ejection process in drop-on-demand devices. A drop-on-demand inkjet printer consists of a fluid chamber with a nozzle which is actuated to eject the droplet. The actuation pushes a certain amount of the liquid out of the fluid chamber through the nozzle. A drop is ejected when the liquid pushed out of the nozzle gains enough forward momentum to overcome the surface tension restoring effect, [5]. The generation and  behaviour of liquid droplets [6] is effected by the Surface tension, inertia and viscosity.
 
Surface tension is a contractive tendency of the surface of a liquid that allows it to resist an external force. Liquid atoms or molecules at a free surface have higher energy than those inside the liquid body. Therefore, the shape of liquid with the lowest surface tension energy is sphere. For the generation of a droplet, a liquid must necessarily have the tendency to form a shape with lowest energy. The attraction of water molecules to each other is greater than the molecules in the air, when the droplet is generated. As a result, an inward force at its surface makes water to  behave as if its surface was covered by a stretched elastic membrane. This is also the primary cause of pinch
off effect [7]. The surface tension of most of the liquids used in inkjet printing have the order of tens of dyn/cm (or mN/m). The importance and influence of the above  parameters can characterized by three essential dimensionless numbers: 1. Reynolds number, 2.Weber number and 3.Ohnesorge number [8].
Figure 1
 Stages of droplet formation process [9]
The ink inside the nozzle stays at equilibrium state, before the nozzle gets actuated. Ink velocity and pressure are zero at initial stage (A). A high pressure is generated inside the nozzle when the nozzle gets actuated, and the liquid start to flow out from the nozzle orifice (B). Kinetic energy is transported from the actuator walls to outflow and it undergoes an attenuation  process, in order to overcome the resistance from surface tension (C). The droplet is then connected with the liquid inside the nozzle by a skinny fluid filament (D). When the liquid column momentum is large enough, the droplet will escape from the nozzle (E). Surface tension acts as a force to pinch off the ligament. The meniscus retracts inside the nozzle (F). In the inkjet printing applications, a single droplet is invariably desired but due to surface tension additional satellite droplets which are usually smaller than intended primary droplet, are formed and they cause several problems in printing [10]. When the unexpected satellite droplets land on places other than where primary droplets do, they result in the degradation of  print quality, which further leads amination or failure. This is most clearly indicated by the  blurring of the trailing edge of a printed area [11].
 
A Numerical Simulation and Validation Study of the Mathematical Model of Droplet Formation in Drop on Demand Inkjet Printer and the Effect of Rheological Properties of Polymerink for Automobile Lighting Application
 
http://www.iaeme.com/IJMET/index.asp 1328 editor@iaeme.com
The drop formation phenomenon is theoretically, governed by Navier 
 – 
Stokes equations with appropriate boundary conditions describing fluid interface motions [12]. The conventional methods cannot be used to obtain the desired mathematical solutions because of the prevalence of the nonlinearities arising from inertia, capillarity, and coupling of the free surface kinematics to the flow field. Hence, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package FLOW-3D V 10.0 [13] is utilised to simulate the complex fluid dynamic process during drop ejection and it is validated with energy model. Some other researches on droplet formation process in Drop-On-Demand inkjet printing need to be analysed to overcome the problem. A quantum of research work has been carried out in the mechanism of droplet formation, especially on Newtonian fluids, subsequent to the invention of the first DOD inkjet printer in the 1940s. In the recent years, as more Non
 Newtonian fluids have been widely used in manufacturing of automobile electronics and a bulk of research on the droplet formation of Non- Newtonian fluids are carried effectively. Due to the tens of micron length and the time scale of less than a hundred micro
second, micro scale droplet generation differs from macro scale droplet generation. Shin
et al.
[14] and Verkouteren
et al.
[15] analysed the transient process of droplet generation using a charge coupled device (CCD). Dong [16] and Carr [17] studied the dynamics of drop
on
demand (DOD) droplet formation using an imaging system with an inter 
frame time of 1 μs. The experiment was
conducted on a viscosity range of (1.0
 5.0 cP) and surface tensions (35
 – 
 73 mN/m). They investigated the stages of droplet formation including the ejection and stretching of liquid and the pinch
off of liquid thread from the nozzle exit. Lopez
et al.
[18] studied the combination effect of ink rheological behaviour focusing on the dynamics of filament break 
up and effect of rheological properties on droplet formation. Cittadino et al. [19] developed a non
linear model to predict the velocity of the ejected droplet, based on a balance of forces, showing that the ejection velocity is a strong function of the applied voltage. Feng and James [20] proposed an comparatively simpler approach based on a series of numerical calculations on Flow3D. This reference has given an idea about the droplet ejection behaviour for establishing nozzle head design and shows that the volume of ejected droplet is very close to the volume of fluid pushed through the nozzle by an actuation pulse.
2. NUMERICAL SIMULATION FOR DROPLET FORMATION BASED ON ENERGY APPROACH
The energy required to form the droplet are equated in energy approach, to find the diameter of the droplet. Based on the law of conservation of momentum, the energies before and after impact are equated to find the splat diameter (i.e.) Diameter of the spread after fall on the substrate [21].
2.1. Energy Required to Eject Single Droplet from the Nozzle
These energies are required to eject the droplet is as follows:
 
Energy [E
1
] required to deflecting the membrane.
 
Frictional energy [E
2
] in the orifice.
 
Kinetic energy [E
3
] of droplet at the outlet of print head.
 
Surface tension energy [E
4
] of the droplet at outlet.
The total energy [E] required to eject the droplet from nozzle should be greater or equal to the sum of these energies.

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