Use of ink jet for non-conventional printing applications

Ink jet printing has become popular for documents and photographic printing, together with some important industrial applications, like product marking. For some decades these applications contributed to the success of this revolutionary technology, but it is recent the use of ink jet for other kinds of alternative material handling, and the micro- and nano-electronics are more and more demanding from such bottom-up, additive method of deposition. In this paper an overview of non conventional applications of ink jet, and a more detailed insight to a couple of them will be given: printable electronics and biomedical microarrays, which have already been studied in our laboratories.