Flexible nozzle based liquid metal direct writing system assisted in patterned silicon nanowires

Abstract

Liquid metal shows great potential in the fields of consumer electronics, wearable devices, and electronic skin, etc. At the same time, the liquid metal of the micro-Nano structure can also be used to obtain structures such as nanowires. However, traditional direct writing methods are difficult to achieve high precision due to the nozzle diameter, and the viscosity of the liquid metal. In order to overcome that, this paper proposes an innovative direct writing processing method based on a flexible nozzle. A self-made flexible glass nozzle is used in this method. The liquid metal extrusion direction and the nozzle movement direction are collinear during processing, thus making full use of the momentum while the contact area of the liquid metal with the substrate increases. A system was designed and built, the liquid metal dot features and line features were characterized based on this system. The manufacturing resolution of liquid metal is greatly improved, the resolution of spheres and lines can reach 28 μm and 10 μm, respectively. The experiment results demonstrate that the system has the advantages of dimensional stability, structure simplicity, and cost efficiency. In addition, a silicon nanowire structure is obtained through SLS mechanism with liquid metal line. The result indicates that the liquid metal wire produced is small enough to catalyze the growth of silicon nanowires. Overall, this method further improves the accuracy of the liquid metal direct writing. It shows great application potential in the field of flexible electronics Nanowire preparation and Nano technology.