Abstract
The integration of electronics into the process flow of the additive manufacturing of 3D objects is demonstrated using water soluble films as a temporary flexible substrate. Three process variants are detailed to evaluate their capabilities to meet the additive manufacturing requirements. One of them, called water transfer printing, shows the best ability to fabricate electronics onto 3D additively manufactured objects. Moreover, a curved capacitive touchpad hidden by color films is successfully transferred onto the 3D objects, showing a potential application of this technology to fabricate fully additively manufactured discrete or even hidden electronic devices.
Highlights
Additive manufacturing (AM) is a relatively new process that has been called the “third industrial revolution” [1,2,3]
Rapid prototyping has benefited from the versatility of additive manufacturing and structural parts are available off the shelf [4,5]
We investigate the capability of the aforementioned techniques to be integrated into the process flow of additive manufacturing technology
Summary
Additive manufacturing (AM) is a relatively new process that has been called the “third industrial revolution” [1,2,3]. In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), embedding smart devices, such as conformal electronics (e.g., antennas, sensors, interconnects, electronic circuits...) to structural parts will be one of the technological steps of additive manufacturing technology [6,7,8,9]. Additive manufacturing is a good candidate to allow the fabrication of highly conformal electronics directly onto 3D daily-life objects [7,8,10]. It could be directly integrated into the manufacturing sequence of the fabrication process of new “smart parts”. Two main approaches have been developed and can be summarized as follows
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