Thermal actuator with optimized heater for liquid drop ejectors

In this paper, we present a novel liquid drop emitter driven by a bimorph cantilever. We describe our experimental and theoretical investigation of the multilayer thermal microactuator as the active component of our microfluidic ejector. We discuss the mathematical models used and compare the predictions of the models with experimental data. We use the models to optimize the performance of our droplet generator. We found the optimal heater length to be 67% of the total length of the microactuator. We compare our full 3D coupled-multiphysics numerical simulations with the performance of optimized real devices. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.