Characterization of Metal Sprays Created by a Picosecond Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) Process

A new method to analyze and quantify results obtained with the Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) process is presented. This experiment based characterization method was designed to investigate the spraying behavior of the LIFT process, that occurs in certain fluence regimes. This method was implemented in MATLAB, and takes 3D data (e.g. obtained from confocal microscopy) as input and subsequently determines an effective radius and the shape of each deposited feature. By using this tool in experiments it was found that, the effective radius of features depends a.o. on the separation between the donor layer and the receiving substrate. In addition, the tool allows statistical investigation of the effective radius.