Laser ablation (LA), which employs a pulsed laser to remove materials from a substrate for generating micro-/nanostructures, has tremendous applications in the fabrication of metals, ceramics, glasses and polymers. It has become a noteworthy approach for achieving various functional structures in engineering, chemistry, biology, medicine and other fields. Polymers are one such class of materials; they can be melted and vaporized at high temperature during the ablation process. A number of polymers have been researched as candidate substrates in LA, and many different structures and patterns have been realized by this method. The current states of research and progress are reviewed from basic concepts to optimal parameters, polymer types and applications. The significance of this paper is to provide a basis for follow-up research that leads to the development of superior materials and high-quality production through LA. In this review, we first introduce the basic concept of LA, including mechanism, laser types (millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond, picosecond and femtosecond) and influential parameters (wavelength, repetition rate, fluence and pulse duration). Then, we focus on several commonly used polymer materials and compare them in detail, including the effects of polymer properties, laser parameters and feature designs. Finally, we summarize the applications of various structures fabricated by LA in a variety of areas along with a perspective of the challenges in this research area. Overall, a thorough review of LA of several polymers is presented, which could pave the way for characterization of future novel materials.

This paper presents a new high-resolution ac-pulse modulated electrohydrodynamic (EHD)-jet printing technology on highly insulating substrates for drop-on-demand fabrication of electrical features and interconnects using silver nanoink. In traditional EHD-jet printing, the remained charge of the printed droplets changes the electrostatic field distribution and interrupts the follow-on printing behavior, especially for highly insulating substrates which have slow charge decay rates. The residue charge makes the control of EHD-jet printing very challenging for high-resolution continuous features. In this paper, by using modulated ac-pulsed voltage, the EHD-jet printing process switches the charge polarity of the consequent droplets to neutralize the charge on the substrate. The effect of the residue charge is minimized, which enables high-resolution printing of continuous patterns. Moreover, by modulating the pulse frequency, voltage, and duration, the EHD-jet printing behavior can be controlled with respect to printing speed/frequency and droplet size. Printing frequency is directly controlled by the pulse frequency, and the droplet dimension is controlled by the voltage and the duration of the pulse. We demonstrated that ac-pulse modulated EHD-jet printing can overcome the long-predicated charge accumulation problem on highly insulating substrates, and potentially be applied to many flexible electronics applications.

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