Abstract
Photonic curing has shown great promise in maintaining the integrity of flexible thin polymer substrates without structural degradation due to shrinkage, charring or decomposition during the sintering of printed functional ink films in milliseconds at high temperatures. In this paper, single-step photonic curing of screen-printed nickel (Ni) electrodes is reported for sensor, interconnector and printed electronics applications. Solid bleached sulphate paperboard (SBS) and polyethylene terephthalate polymer (PET) substrates are employed to investigate the electrical performance, ink transfer and ink spreading that directly affect the fabrication of homogeneous ink films. Ni flake ink is selected, particularly since its effects on sintering and rheology have not yet been examined. The viscosity of Ni flake ink yields shear-thinning behavior that is distinct from that of screen printing. The porous SBS substrate is allowed approximately 20% less ink usage. With one-step photonic curing, the electrodes on SBS and PET exhibited electrical performances of a minimum of 4 Ω/sq and 16 Ω/sq, respectively, at a pulse length of 1.6 ms, which is comparable to conventional thermal heating at 130 °C for 5 min. The results emphasize the suitability of Ni flake ink to fabricate electronic devices on flexible substrates by photonic curing.
Highlights
Photonic curing has shown great promise in maintaining the integrity of flexible thin polymer substrates without structural degradation due to shrinkage, charring or decomposition during the sintering of printed functional ink films in milliseconds at high temperatures
We investigate the one-step photonic curing of a screen-printed Ni flake ink prototype on nonporous PET and porous Solid bleached sulphate paperboard (SBS) substrates for printed electronics applications
The rheology at different temperatures revealed that the Ni ink prototype is a nematic liquid crystal
Summary
Photonic curing has shown great promise in maintaining the integrity of flexible thin polymer substrates without structural degradation due to shrinkage, charring or decomposition during the sintering of printed functional ink films in milliseconds at high temperatures. Conventional drying systems for metallic inks require processing times that range from minutes to hours at high temperatures and adversely affect heat-sensitive substrates with low glass-transition temperatures[21]. Photonic light irradiation has been reported to show great promise to sinter metallic inks at high temperatures in milliseconds while maintaining the integrity of flexible polymer and paper substrates without structural degradations such as caused by charring or decomposition[22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35]. On the other hand, has the highest sensitivity and TCR relative to the other metals[36]
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