Aerosol and microparticle generation using a commercial inkjet printer

Abstract

Simple Modifications to widely available commercial-off-theshelf (COTS) inkjet printers and cartridges enabled production of aerosols that were tunable in number, size, and size-distribution width. Aerosols generated from various solutions using an inkjet printerwith varying control software settings were dehydrated into solid microparticles for characterization using an aerodynamic particle sizer (APS) to determine particle number and size. The duration of microdroplet and microparticle production using this method was adjustable by varying the size of the print job image sent from the control computer. The microparticles created using the inkjet printer were predominantly 1-5 μm in aerodynamic diameter. Tuning of the size of the created microparticle sizedistribution was achieved by changing the solute concentration in the printed solution. The size of the dried particles increased monotonically with solute concentration as expected. The aerosol sizedistribution width was customizable by varying the COTS inkjet printer control software settings. The highest quality programmed print modes produced a narrower size-distribution compared to the rapid, low quality print options available in the software. The morphology of the dehydrated microparticles was determined to be spherical using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). These experiments demonstrated the successful use of commonly accessible commercial inkjet printers and software to produce tunable and well-characterized aerosol size-distributions in an easily controlled manner. The customizable aerosols and microparticles produced using this method displayed diverse properties that may be tailored to a wide range of experimental applications. © American Association for Aerosol Research.