Abstract
In general, the evaporation and drying process of liquid film is a complex thermo-fluid phenomenon related to phase change and heat/mass transfer accompanied by changes in the physical properties of the liquid and understanding them is important in improving the performance of inkjet printers. In inkjet printers, ink droplets are ejected onto the media by an inkjet printhead to form a thin liquid film, which is then fixed by evaporation in a dryer. The dryer is one of the modules that consumes the most power among the inkjet printer components, and it is important to understand the evaporation behavior of the ink liquid film. One effective method to understand the evaporation behavior of ink film is to measure the temporal change in viscosity of the ink film surface. However, it has been difficult to measure the viscosity of thin liquid films formed by inkjet printheads using conventional methods. In this study, we propose to measure the temporal change of the viscosity of the liquid film surface by applying the Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) method.
