Simulation of transference regimes in BA-LIFT of water-glycerol and LIFT of high-viscosity silver pastes

Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) is a direct-write laser technique for the transference of material in an enormous range of viscosities and rheological behaviors, from solid-state to low-density inks. Furthermore, LIFT enables the transference of small volumes of material (as low as picoliters) with a high lateral spatial resolution (down to a few micrometers) to produce printed patterns with great flexibility. In this work, simulations using a finite-element model involving Phase Field tracking method are presented and compared with experimental results. Specifically, two LIFT processes are studied: a modified model is used to reproduce the secondary effects (such as bulgy shapes and secondary jets) observed after several ms in Blister-Actuated LIFT (BA-LIFT) of glycerol/water mixtures, and a model for LIFT transference of high-viscosity metallic pastes employed to study the different regimes observed in experiments (non-transference, explosive, cluster, dot, and bridge transfer)