(Invited) Scalable Printing of Flexible/Wearable Energy and Sensor Systems

Abstract

Nanoscale materials are attractive and promising building blocks for a broad range of emerging technologies due to their unique and superior properties compared to the bulk form. However, converting nanoscale materials into high-performing functional systems while translating their unique properties from nanoscale to macroscale remain a major challenge due to many scientific and technological obstacles.This talk will focus on our research on developing versatile and synergistic additive manufacturing and nanomanufacturing methods to manufacture and transform a broad range of emerging functional nanomaterials into innovative and sustainable energy and sensor systems in a highly scalable, controllable and affordable manner. This talk will present our recent research progresses scalable printing and photonic sintering to fabricate flexible thermoelectric generator (f-TEG) for energy harvesting. Our printed p-type and n-type flexible films demonstrate peak thermoelectric figure of merit ZT greater than unity near room temperature, which is among the highest reported ZT values in flexible thermoelectric materials. In addition, this talk will also present a novel hybrid printing method that can integrate functional materials and soft structural materials and fabricate highly stretchable and wearable sensors for a broad range of physical and chemical sensing applications.