Approach to optimizing printed conductive lines in high-resolution roll-to-roll gravure printing

Roll-to-roll gravure printing has recently gained considerable interest regarding its application for manufacturing printed electronics, owing to its potential for processing large areas at low costs with high throughput. The geometry of the printed lines depends mainly on the process parameters. Unfortunately, missing areas and well-defined line widths have opposite tendencies. This paper presents a multi-response optimization process for printing high-resolution conductive lines using roll-to-roll gravure printing. Our optimization is based on grey relational analysis and an analysis of variance in conjunction with the Taguchi method, which uses an orthogonal array. Together, these techniques are used to optimize the printed pattern geometry and missing areas. Furthermore, we investigate several parameters for roll-to-roll gravure printing, such as ink viscosity, printing speed, and nip pressure, and the effect of these parameters on the line width, thickness, and missing areas of the printed pattern. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed method, and the results of this evaluation demonstrate an improvement to the well-defined line width, thickness, and continuity of conductive lines under optimal parameter settings using the proposed grey-based Taguchi method.