Jetting behavior of polymer solutions in drop-on-demand inkjet printing

The jetting of dilute polymer solutions in drop-on-demand printing is investigated. A quantitative model is presented which predicts three different regimes of behavior depending upon the jet Weissenberg number Wi and extensibility of the polymer molecules. In regime I (Wi   L), the chains remain fully extended in the thinning ligament. The maximum polymer concentration at which a jet of a certain speed can be formed scales with molecular weight to the power of (1-3ν), (1-6ν), and −2ν in the three regimes, respectively, where ν is the solvent quality coefficient. Experimental data obtained with solutions of monodisperse polystyrene in diethyl phthalate with molecular weights between 24 and 488 kDa, previous numerical simulations of this system, and p...

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