Manufacturing of Micro-Nozzle Plates for High Resolution Inkjethead Using LIGA-like Process

Micro-nozzle plate is a key component of inject printing device, its quality directly affects the quality of the resolution and the spurt quality of an inkjet printing device. In this paper, an innovation micro-nozzle plate fabrication has been proposed and realized using LIGA-like and micro-injection molding technologies. Compared with current industry fabrication processes, this new fabrication process has the advantage on low cost and mass replication. This novel fabrication technique reduces the production cost from 100% current process to 50%. In this study, the mold insert with of the micro-nozzle plate was fabricated through Laser-LIGA process; both core pins and microchannels of the nozzle plate were integrated and fabricated at the same time. In order to get balance filling of the mold, the mold was designed using Moldex3D commercial software, initial processing window was obtained through filling analysis. Taguchi method was implemented in this study to obtain the best processing parameters for this micromolding process. Inside the processing window, it was found that mold temperature and cooling time have more impact on the quality of the micro-nozzle plate, while other parameters did not have too much effect on the part quality when they are inside the processing window. As the result shows that, this study has proposed an innovative fabrication method for molding a high resolution and low cost micro-nozzle plate, and a good quality of micro-nozzle was successfully molded in this study.