Enhancing Droplet Quality of Edible Ink in Single and Multi-Drop Methods by Optimization the Waveform Design of DoD Inkjet Printer

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Do edible printers generally use this print-head manufacture? If so, do say so, as it is very difficult to judge the impact of this study on the application.

You refer to using a different property of the ink in order to improve the drop quality from the print-head you used, but then never said what it was! If you make such statements in the introduction, this reader expects more, so the paper was rather disappointing from a more scientific viewpoint. What other physical properties of the edible ink could be/are responsible?

Multi-pulse refers to waveforms with many pulses to produce a single drop, so are these results refer to the reliable production of single drops without any leading drops or bursts of separate drops at the deposition distance of 1mm?

I think you should revise your sentence structures for logic and readability, as although the English words are appropriately used they can/do confuse.

please check the labels for Table 2 as they appear confused/out of registration.

Author Response

Thank you for the valuable comments. Yes, that's right, this edible ink can use the same print-head. However, because the edible ink has a lower viscosity, if you use the standard waveform design obtained from the print-head manufacturer, the printer company can only use the print-head for the binary printing method, and produce good droplets only at low voltages. Thus, the droplet size range produced from the print-head is very limited, because if a higher voltage is used, the resulting droplet will be followed by satellite. By modifying the wave design, printer companies do not need to replace the print-heads used to apply the greyscale method to Drop on Demand (DoD) printers. In addition, the quality of the resulting droplets can still be maintained properly.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

That's an interesting research and will provide insight for the inkjet printing of edible inks. There are a few problems about the manuscript:

(a) What is the motivation of developing a printing method for less viscous ink? For example, is it highly demand to print inks with low viscosity? Maybe the author could introduce this in the introduction.

(b) It's not clear how the assumption was made that a smaller rear-ramp will reduce the residual vibration. Could the authors make this more clear in the text and maybe also add a comparision in Figure 4 to compare the composite wave with and without modification.

(c) reference 21 is missing.

(d) line 110, should the "Fig. 3" be "Fig. 4"? 

 

 

Author Response

(a)Thank you for your valuable comments.  I provided additional explanation in the introduction, regarding the background or urgency of doing this research.

(b) I have also provided an additional explanation regarding the initial study of how this preliminary waveform was made, namely W waveform that was generated from 2 standard waveforms that were shifted and overlapped so it can produce an initial wave response that had a large negative pressure.

(c) The comparison between the unmodified and modified waves by cutting the rear-wave is shown in Figure 5

(d) Done, thanks

(e) Done, Thanks

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors show us a way to print low viscosity inks without using costly printing heads. The paper discusses how to optimize the process, but it may be better for readers to understand if the part of “experimental results” are improved. Like inconsistent picture sizes (Table 1), non-standard references (Line 106), and incomplete test methods(figue 4).

Author Response

Thanks for the valuable comments. I have revised the manuscript by considering comments from reviewers. I added more explanation about how the experiment was conducted, with additional figures (waveform setting and drop watch form that can be displayed by the experiment device). I also revised the references.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

the experimental methods and resultshave fully described , but the table can be further simplified (table 1)