Modelling of Power-Law Fluid Flow Inside a Piezoelectric Inkjet Printhead

Piezoelectric three-dimensional inkjet printing has been used to manufacture heterogeneous objects due to its high level of flexibility. The materials used are non-Newtonian inks with complex rheological properties, and their behavior in the context of inkjet printing has not been fully understood: for example, the fact that the shear-thinning viscosity affects the droplet generation. Therefore, a control strategy coping with shear-thinning behaviors is needed to ensure printing consistency. In this paper, a novel model-based approach is presented to describe the shear-thinning ink dynamics inside the piezoelectric inkjet printhead, which provides the basis to design the excitation parameters in a systematic way. The dynamic equation is simplified into a quasi-one-dimensional equation through the combination of the boundary layer theory and the constitutive equation of the power-law fluid, of which the viscosity is shear-thinning. Based on this, a nonlinear time-varying equivalent circuit model is presented to simulate the power-law fluid flow rate inside the tube. The feasibility and effectiveness of this model can be evaluated by comparing the results of computational fluid dynamics and the experimental results.