Ceramic ink-jet printing on glass substrate using oleophobic surface treatment

Abstract

Ink-jet printing has become a widespread technology with the society's increase in aesthetic awareness. Especially, ink-jet printing using glazed ceramic ink can offer huge advantages including high quality decoration, continuous processing, glaze patterning, and direct reproduction of high resolution images. Recently, ceramic ink-jet printing has been rapidly introduced to decorate the porcelain product and the ceramic tiles. In this study, we provide an effective method to apply ceramic ink-jet decorations on the glass substrates using a oleophobic coating with perfluorooctyl trichlorosilane. The ink-jet printed patterns were much clearer on the oleophobically coated glass surface than the bare glass surface. The contact angle of the ceramic ink was maximized to the value of 64.0o on the glass surface, when it was treated with 1 vol% PFTS solution for 1 min. The effects of the printing conditions and firing process on the ink-jet printed patterns on the oleophobically coated glass were also investigated.