In Knol-edge, Harrie Knol shares his knowledge on precision metal. Harrie is Head of Application Engineering at Veco and helps our clients' engineers to shape their projects.
In this video Harrie talks about our electroformed Inkjet Nozzle Plates.
Transcript below
Today I want to tell you something about our electroformed inkjets. What most people don't know is that most of the tiles in your bathroom or your laminates on the floor or the table are printed with our electroformed inkjets nozzle plates. We do it by electroforming and it's a way of additive manufacturing and it means that we don't make the holes but we make the material around the holes.
We make holes down to two microns, but for inkjet application the smallest hole at this moment is about 12 microns and the biggest one is about 42 micron hole in diameter. We can do it in two different shapes. This one is preferred in 95% of the applications. This shape, we call it Belmont shape, it's preferred. And it gives you superior jet straightness.
If you compare it to technologies like EDM, laser or whatever, it gives you very very straight jet straightness. To give you a figure, it's about 0.8 degrees at sigma. Also, it's a metal product, which means that it gives you also a very rigid product. That’s very important because our nozzle plates can be used at very high frequencies, so many droplets per second.
It's also very corrosion resistant. It's not only the chemical corrosion but also the abrasive corrosion is quite important. You can imagine if you are in a textile environment or in a ceramic environment, there is a lot of dust involved and you have to clean these products, and as there is a very hard coating on top of our nozzle plates, and normally it's palladium nickel, it's about 800 vickers hardness. You can easily clean them without damaging the nozzles.
Last but not least is the automated inspection. It doesn’t matter if you order 96 holes in an inkjet, 256, 1024, or even more. Each hole will be completely automated, inspected and measured. Measurements data are stored and are sent with each product to our customer so we can adjust his equipment to what he’s willing to do with the product.
This is just in a nutshell what we can do on inkjets. If you are really interested, please download our white paper, visit our website or contact an engineer.
Stay tuned and see more FAQs answered by Harrie Knol, the industry leading expert in Electroforming.
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