Material Deposition

The field of Material Deposition is immense and encompasses many different technologies and processes.

Torrey Pines Research is the leading independent technical authority on controlled image-wise deposition of dry powders and toner material. As a technical consulting and product development firm that has historically been dedicated to serving the digital printing and reprographics industry, TPR has been actively creating processes, sub-systems, and products to deposit powder sized materials since the company’s inception in 1986.

So, what are these materials? Actually, they can be anything that has a size on the order of a few tenths of a micrometer or less. The dyes and pigments used to provide colorants in liquid ink and dry powder created images are materials suitable for image-wise deposition. The sub-micron additives to liquid inks and dry powders are also these types of materials. What has traditionally been generally thought of as the “liquid ink” or “dry toner” in a printing system has actually been the bulk carrier or transporter of the more functionally important imaging components of the material.

In recent years, TPR has been engaged by numerous other industries (those outside of the mainstream digital printing industries) requiring controlled deposition of liquids and/or dry powders to resolve problems unique to that particular industry. In this regard, TPR has conducted numerous projects for depositing unique materials to unusual substrates using processes and hardware, or modifications and enhancements to such, that are typical to digital printing technologies. Some of the recent examples of such TPR work include:

• Pharmaceutical tablet coating and drug loading
• Medical implant device coating
• OLED flat panel display fabrication

In developing methods to controllably and image-wise deposit unique materials, the biggest challenge is matching/optimizing the properties of the unique material to be deposited, to the requirements of the deposition process and hardware, while simultaneously, not disturbing the original and important functional properties of the unique material. To mitigate this problem, TPR has developed technology, know-how, and Intellectual Property (IP) directed at separating the functional properties of a unique material from the properties of a material specifically required by the deposition system. This TPR breakthrough and capability greatly expands the ability to enable precision placement of these materials, heretofore uncontrollably depositable.

Torrey Pines Research's expertise is in the technologies utilized to precisely and digitally deposit unique liquid and/or dry powder materials onto two and three dimensional surfaces.

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The listing below delineates the tremendous number of terms potentially utilized to describe the deposition of a material onto some substrate.