Roll to Roll Air-Floating Oven Drying Process Design and Analysis for Printed Electronics

Printed electronics is a set of printing methods used to create electrical devices such as OLEDs, e-paper, RFID on various substrates with common printing equipment, such as screen printing flexography, gravure, offset lithography, and inkjet. Roll to Roll (R2R) is one of the most promising production technologies in the printed electronics for saving production cost and increasing production speed. R2R production includes various processes such as printing, drying, winding, unwinding, and so on. In this paper the research on design and analysis of drying process is performed, which is essential for efficient and fast drying process when printing is finished. In a printed electronics R2R system, an air flotation oven is employed for the drying process. The air flotation oven is commonly used for the noncontact support and drying of coated web materials such as plastic films and paper Air flotation oven consists of noncontact supports and drying of coated web materials such as plastic films and paper After the air flotation oven is designed, experimental results and numerical analysis for the drying process are investigated.