| Pulsed Electrohydrodynamic Jetting for “Drop-and-Place” Particle Manipulation | ||
| Chuan-Hua Chen, Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton University, G-104 Engineering Quadrangle, Princeton, NJ 08544, Dudley A. Saville, Princeton University, A-302 Engineering Quadrangle, Princeton, NJ 08544 and Ilhan A. Aksay, Princeton University, A-311 Engineering Quadrangle, Princeton, NJ 08544 Drop-and-place aims at delivering the building blocks of microstructures using colloidal droplets as carrying medium; this approach combines the merits of pick-and-place and self-assembly. Among contemporary techniques used for drop generation, pulsed electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jetting is the only one which can produce on-demand drops with dimensions at least one-order-of-magnitude smaller than the nozzle. Here, we report an experimentally validated model for externally pulsed EHD jetting, and the application of this model in the drop-and-place of an array of colloidal particles. We show that the flow rate is limited by viscous drag in a thin nozzle, which leads to intrinsic pulsations of the cone-jet. We demonstrate that millimeter-scale nozzles can be utilized to achieve micron-scale positioning accuracy and single-particle dosing accuracy. Extended Abstract Status: Not Uploaded | ||