Abstract
In recent printed electronics technology, a photo-sintering technique using intense pulsed light (IPL) source has attracted attention, instead of conventional a thermal sintering process with long time and high temperature. The key principle of the photo-sintering process is the selective heating of a thin film with large light absorption coefficients, while a transparent substrate does not heat by the IPL source. Most research on photo-sintering has used a xenon flash lamp as a light source. However, the xenon flash lamp requires instantaneous high power and is unsuitable for large area applications. In this work, we developed a new photo-sintering system using a high-power ultraviolet light emitting diode (UV-LED) module. A LED light source has many merits such as low power consumption and potential large-scale application. The silver nanoparticles ink was inkjet-printed on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and photo-sintered by the UV-LED module with the wavelength of 365 and 385 nm. The electrical resistivity as low as 5.44 × 10−6 Ω·cm (just about three times compared to value of bulk silver) was achieved at optimized photo-sintering conditions (wavelength of 365 nm and light intensity of 300 mW/cm2).
Highlights
Printed electronics technology has been developed with materials like metal nanoparticles ink, non-contact technology like drop-on-demand inkjet technology for printing materials on any substrate, and post-treatment process in order to obtain good properties from materials [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Thanks to the developments, printed electronics have applied to radio-frequency identification (RFID)
The metal nanoparticles with high surface to mass ratio have high absorption and low melting point compared to the bulk metal
Summary
Printed electronics technology has been developed with materials like metal nanoparticles ink, non-contact technology like drop-on-demand inkjet technology for printing materials on any substrate, and post-treatment process in order to obtain good properties from materials [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Nanomaterials 2021, 11, 2840 including chemical self-sintering [16,17], electrical [18,19,20], infrared [21,22,23,24], laser [25,26,27], microwave [28,29,30], plasma [31,32,33,34], and photo sintering methods [35,36,37,38,39,40,41] Among these post-annealing processes, photo-sintering has been the center of attention as a new method process without significantly heating the substrate [42]. In this work, we invented a new photo-sintering system using high-power ultraviolet light emitting diode (UV-LED) modules with different wavelengths for sintering silver nanoparticle thin film ink-jet printed on the PET substrate. Effects of photo-sintering parameters such as light intensity, irradiation duration, and wavelength of UV-LEDs on the electrical properties of Ag thin films were investigated
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