Effect of surface energies on screen printing resolution

The influence of surface energies on line resolution in screen printing was studied in this paper. Ink wettability on surfaces is decreased by decreasing the surface energies of substrates-the reduction in wettability improves the line resolution. For such high surface-energy substrates as ceramics, the effective means to improve the line resolution is to use high thixotropic inks. On the other hand, for low surface energy polymer substrates, the line resolution can be heightened by increasing the surface energies of inks. If the critical surface tension of a substrate is lower than the surface energy of inks, good line resolution can be achieved even though low viscosity inks were used. The use of low viscosity inks has quite a lot of advantages.