Conformal aerosol jet printing using a 3-axis printer

Conformal patterning using contact printing methods has been problematic, owing to the complex topography of realistic surfaces and the sensitivity of print quality to the nozzle-substrate distance. Motion planning for such printing configurations is also a challenge, with conventional methods using tessellated representations to generate conformal toolpaths. However, these representations are often subject to truncation errors, thus diminishing the accuracy of the printed part. We propose and demonstrate a novel method to perform conformal aerosol jet printing on curved and topographically complex surfaces. We begin with a non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) definition of a surface, perform patch selection (i.e., area of interest) and extract its associated points and normals, and then generate GCode for conformal printing. We make use of a serpentine toolpath that resembles a strain-sensor pattern, thus suggesting the generalization of this method to conformal printing of circuits for applications in sensing, chemical analysis, thermal management, and pharmaceutical delivery with relative ease.