Design and fabrication of multimaterial electrohydrodynamic-jet deposition system

Abstract

Electrohydrodynamic jet (E-jet) printing has emerged as a high resolution alternative to other forms of direct solution-based fabrication approaches, such as ink-jet printing. This thesis discusses the design, integration and operation of a unique E-jet printing platform. The uniqueness lies in the ability to utilize multiple materials in the same overall print-head thereby enabling increased degrees of heterogeneous integration of different functionalities on a single substrate. By utilizing multiple individual print-heads, with a carrousel indexing among them, increased material flexibility is achieved. The hardware design and system operation for a relatively inexpensive system are developed and presented. Crossover interconnects and multiple fluorescent tagged proteins, demonstrating printed electronics and biological sensing applications, respectively.