Inkjet Summer School

The Inkjet Summer School as part of the Inkjet Technology Showcase 2015 consists of three great courses, including the world-famous Inkjet Academy.

Inkjet Academy - Theory of inkjet Technology

This one and one half day course has been attended by 3,000 in the past 17 years. Completely revised, this course is aimed at people in the industry who would like an up to date overview of the inkjet technology used today.

Understanding the basics is essential to any industry’s development. The Inkjet Academy covers the basic theory behind the many types of inkjet technology used today and aims to give your understanding of the industry an expert start.

The course assumes a basic scientific knowledge and is designed to provide useful background information for anyone entering the inkjet industry, seeking an update on today’s technology or looking for further fields of development.

Course outline

  • Introduction to inkjet
  • Inkjet ink technologies
  • DOD printhead technologies
  • Inkjet ink materials & dispersions
  • Printhead operational issues
  • UV ink chemistry & curing
  • Print & image quality
  • System design issues
  • Emerging technologies
  • Inkjet applications

Inkjet Ink Manufacturing - Manufacturing InkJet Inks for Performance & Reliability

This course provides a good background of the types of inkjet inks and materials that are used in today’s inkjet printers. How are inks actually made? Is pigmented ink more expensive to make than dye-based ink? What is involved in manufacturing advanced inkjet inks?

Designed for those wishing to develop, source, or commission the development and manufacture of inkjet inks, the course will help you to understand the issues of development and testing, scale-up for manufacture and the manufacturing processes themselves.

As well as being of interest to inkjet technologists, managers will benefit from an understanding of the inkjet ink manufacturing process to set realistic project and revenue plans and to decide whether to manufacture in-house or externally source ink.

Course outline

  • Critical aspects of inkjet system design
  • Ink formulation considerations for manufacturing
  • Creating robust material specifications
  • Testing protocols & validation for manufacturing
  • Quality control processes
  • Ink plant requirements
  • Manufacturing processes
  • Commercial considerations

Jetting Functional Fluids - Rheology, Deposition, Process, Development

In this course we will focus on the practicalities of inkjet printing of what we may call “challenging fluids”. We will consider in detail the basic building blocks of a material deposition inkjet system: the inkjet heads, ink, the motion platform, the substrate and methods available to make working printed structures. In addition we will provide a background on how we can fine-tune inks and their jetting waveforms to improve performance.

The course will also provide a sometimes salutary background on conventional manufacturing capabilities that must be matched for material deposition by inkjet to move into large scale production environments.

DMP live demonstrations

As part of the course, Neil will be carrying out demonstrations using a deposition system - your chance to see this deposition platform in action, including built in drop-watcher.

Course outline

  • Basic components of an ink jet system for functional fluid deposition (heads, inks, inkjet platform, substrate, functionalising)
  • Inkjet image fundamentals
  • Ink delivery & ink management systems
  • Practical applications & case studies
  • Moving functional printing to industrial scale printing
  • Overview of material deposition & printed electronics using inkjet