Understanding and mitigating process drift in aerosol jet printing

Aerosol jet printing offers a versatile, high-resolution prototyping capability for flexible and hybrid electronics. Despite its rapid growth in recent years, persistent problems such as process drift hinder the adoption of this technology in production environments. Here we explore underlying causes of process drift during aerosol jet printing and introduce an engineered solution to improve deposition stability. It is shown that the ink level within the cartridge is a critical factor in determining atomization efficiency, such that the reduction in ink volume resulting from printing itself can induce significant and systematic process drift. By integrating a custom 3D-printed cartridge with an ink recirculation system, ink composition and level within the cartridge are better maintained. This strategy allows extended duration printing with improved stability, as evidenced by 30 h of printing over 5 production runs. This provides an important tool for extending the duration and improving reliability for aerosol jet printing, a key factor for integration in practical manufacturing operations.