A piezoresistive sensor for pressure monitoring at inkjet nozzle

Author

Wei, Jia ; Sarro, Pasqualina M. ; Duc, Trinh Chu

Author_Institution

Delft Inst. of Microsyst. & Nanoelectron., Delft Univ. of Technol., Delft, Netherlands

fYear

2010

fDate

1-4 Nov. 2010

Firstpage

2093

Lastpage

2096

Abstract

This paper presents a MEMS piezoresistive sensor for monitoring the fluidic pressure at the nozzle of an inkjet during droplet generation. The device consists of a sensing membrane (150 μm wide and 1 μm thick) with a nozzle orifice (20 μm in diameter), and piezo-resistors placed around. The pressure information is useful in detecting missing droplets and estimating the size of the generated droplets. The device is fabricated on SOI wafers with an IC-compatible process. A resistance variation of 8.7% is measured with a 1 × 10⁵ Pa applied pressure. The sensitivity is 3.9 × 10^-7V/Pa in a Wheatstone bridge configuration with 1 V supply voltage. The detected pressure signal can be used to implement a close-loop control to replace the open-loop control in most current commercial inkjet printheads, for better volume precision and system reliability.

Keywords

micromechanical devices; nozzles; orifices (mechanical); piezoresistive devices; pressure sensors; reliability; silicon-on-insulator; IC-compatible process; MEMS piezoresistive sensor for; SOI wafers; Si; close-loop control; fluidic pressure monitoring; inkjet nozzle printhead; open-loop control; pressure monitoring; sensing membrane; size 1 mum; size 150 mum; size 20 mum; system reliability; voltage 1 V; wheatstone bridge;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Sensors, 2010 IEEE

Conference_Location

Kona, HI

ISSN

1930-0395

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-8170-5

Electronic_ISBN

1930-0395

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSENS.2010.5690353

Filename

5690353