This looks like something I toyed with in 2016, but (as you may expect from my lack of relevant experience and qualifications) all I found were what Edison called "ways to not make a lightbulb".
The:
> microelectrode array printhead
in particular is what I wanted to experiment with, because something like this clearly allows parallelisation of the build process in much the same way photopolymerisation is faster than FDM.
I would imagine resolution mostly comes down size of electrode and how close you can get that to the substrate and grow the deposit in a controlled fashion. Mine were 25um. As for wearing out the electrode; madden's paper probably has some information. I would expect the wear to be similar to the oxygen side of electrolysis (water).
I actually got to meet Madden multiple times and he even gave me access to his lab. My physics profs were very impressed by my project but I was disappointed. This electro deposition effect is a bit like lightning and didnt work well with my theories about trying to use a multielectrode head with different voltages to produce a shaped potential.
I dont think there was any rigor in modeling of the field. I did this entire project as one semester as one of my last undergrad courses. I wish I had more time and resources for the project but by then I knew I was headed outside the university into software development.
From what I heard the state of the art was to move away from electrodes and to use lasers. So how that works is that you have the normal electrolytic solution but you apply a passive voltage below the activation voltage. Then you use the laser to break down the double layer at the substrate surface. This leads to laser controlled deposition.
Yes the microelectrode array is the key to driving parallelism of the process, making it area based (layer-at-once) rather than point deposition. DLP/LCD vs laser SLA or FDM is a good analogy!
This looks like something I toyed with in 2016, but (as you may expect from my lack of relevant experience and qualifications) all I found were what Edison called "ways to not make a lightbulb".
The:
> microelectrode array printhead
in particular is what I wanted to experiment with, because something like this clearly allows parallelisation of the build process in much the same way photopolymerisation is faster than FDM.