Mechanical and Electrical Properties of Micro-Lines Fabricated by Laser-Assisted Maskless Microdeposition

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with the analysis of the microstructural properties of silver micro-lines produced by Laser-Assisted Maskless Microdeposition (LAMM). LAMM is a laser based direct write method used in microscale layered manufacturing. In LAMM, liquid-suspended nanoparticles of a variety of materials are deposited in a layer-by-layer fashion and cured by a laser radiation. In this work, conductive micro-lines of silver with widths of 20 μm are fabricated, and their microstructures as well as electrical and mechanical properties are studied. Investigations show that the microstructures are affected by the laser power and the laser scanning velocity. To find the effect of laser processing parameters on the electrical performance of the samples, the conductivity of the samples are expressed in terms of the effective energy absorbed during laser radiation. It is shown that the conductivity of the sintered samples is increased up to 2 × 105 S.m−1 by raising the effective energy density. In addition, mechanical properties, i.e. modulus of elasticity of one of the fabricated samples are obtained using the nanoindentation test.