Abstract
AbstractThe production of electronic circuits and devices is limited by current manufacturing methods that limit both the form and potentially the performance of these systems. Additive manufacturing (AM) is a technology that has been shown to provide cross‐sectoral manufacturing industries with significant geometrical freedom. A research domain known as multifunctional AM (MFAM) in its infancy looks to couple the positive attributes of AM with application in the electronics sector can have a significant impact on the development of new products; however, there are significant hurdles to overcome. This paper reports on the single step MFAM of 3D electronic circuitry within a polymeric structure using a combination of conductive and nonconductive materials within a single material jetting‐based AM system. The basis of this breakthrough is a study of the optical absorption regions of a silver nanoparticle (AgNP) conductive ink which leads to a novel method to rapidly process and sinter AgNP inks in ambient conditions using simple UV radiation contemporaneously with UV‐curing of deposited polymeric structures.
Highlights
A step change in part functionality can be achieved ratus.[27]. This approach shows that the 3D printing of functional through the extension of Additive Manufacturing (AM) inherent flexibility that stems tracks is possible but the method is often limited by the low spatial from its layer-by-layer nature
A light emitting diode (LED)-based UV source was used for all processing experiments, chosen because of the efficiency of LED technology when compared to Mercury vapor UV sources or Xenon lamps as well as the relatively compact size of LED sources
The optical properties of a silver nanoparticle ink used for inkjet printing have been characterized and used to inform a novel sintering protocol based on light absorption
Summary
The 3D inkjet printing of dielectric polymeric inks has been studied thoroughly and are commercially available using UV curing techniques.[52,53] The most commonly available conduc tive inks, such as those consisting of silver, copper, and carbon precursors[29,54,55,56,57,58] consist of nanoparticulate dispersions in carrier solvents with additives such as surfactants to manage agglomeration and viscosity modifiers to tune the viscosity of the ink. When an ink is deposited onto the surface of a sub strate the deposit requires evaporation of the carrier solvent, leaving behind the functional nanoparticles for final sintering onto the substrate.[29,55] This evaporation/sintering process is normally performed ex situ within a temperature range of between 100 and 500 °C and usually takes around 15 min per layer using conventional ovens and similar heat sources.[29,54,55,56] This is significant since the final sintered layer thickness of a commercial silver ink is between 0.5 and 1 μm, and as a conse quence producing a macrosized objects (e.g., >1 mm in height) becomes infeasible due to the repeated postprocessing times required between layers This is contrasted and compounded by the relative efficiency of printing UV curable polymeric mate rials where individual layers of cured material are of the order of 10 μm in thickness and are often polymerized in seconds. Despite this apparent difficulty in processing conductive materials, there are still significant benefits of ink jet printing, if the postdeposition processing can be accelerated; ink jet printing is inherently scalable and when deposition of multiple materials is done contemporaneously it offers the pos sibility for complex properties
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