Conference Program - LOPE-C 2011

SCIENTIFIC CONF. | WEDNESDAY-JUNE 29, 2011
Track 4
Printing Technologies (11:30 am - 01:20 pm) | LOCATION HARMONIE D / LEVEL C2
12:00 pm High Precise Machine Directional Register Control for a Multi-layer Roll-to-roll Printed Electronics
Dr Hyun-Kyoo Kang,
Konkuk University, Post Doc., South Korea
The rising demand for the fabrication of flexible electronics using roll-to-roll technology exposes the abundant challenges of conducting low cost highly productive printing
trials. Discrete printing and single roll printing were applied for printing of electric circuitry. But productivity of these methods is lower than the productivity of a roll-to-roll
continuous printing method.
Printing cylinders between unwinder and rewinder have variations of phase. A strain of substrate passing the printing cylinder is varying due to an effect of inertia,
temperature change in dryer, etc. The variation of strain of the substrate is a major factor of a machine directional register error in a multi-layer printing. Therefore, the
variation of strain should be controlled to minimize the machine directional (MD) register error in a successive roll-to-roll printing.
Brandenburg derived a model of the MD register in a first-order differential equation using an equilibrium equation of mass which is transported by a cylinder. A
non-interacting control method between the tension and cut-off register error was also proposed. Yoshida proposed a MD register controller to compensate for a
downstream register error caused by upstream tension fluctuation.
The MD register is a function of strain of upstream and downstream. The upstream tension could generate MD register errors in a downstream span. So, it is necessary to
reveal the correlation between tension and MD register for developing a precise MD register controller considering the strain. In this paper, modeling of MD register was
derived considering the tension of substrate and phase of printing cylinder. The MD register model was validated and verified by numerical simulation and experiments by
direct gravure printing machine. And a PID controller for MD register error was proposed and verified by experiments. The results can be used for design of MD register
controller for precise roll-to-roll printed electronics.
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