Fully printed transistors are a key component of ubiquitous flexible electronics. In this work, the advantages of an inverse gravure printing technique and the solution processing of semiconductor-enriched single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are combined to fabricate fully printed thin-film transistors on mechanically flexible substrates. The fully printed transistors are configured in a top-gate device geometry and utilize silver metal electrodes and an inorganic/organic high-κ (~17) gate dielectric. The devices exhibit excellent performance for a fully printed process, with mobility and on/off current ratio of up to ~9 cm(2)/(V s) and 10(5), respectively. Extreme bendability is observed, without measurable change in the electrical performance down to a small radius of curvature of 1 mm. Given the high performance of the transistors, our high-throughput printing process serves as an enabling nanomanufacturing scheme for a wide range of large-area electronic applications based on carbon nanotube networks.

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Abstract. In this paper, we review the recent development of phase-field models and their numerical methods for multi-component fluid flows with interfacial phenomena. The models consist of a Navier-Stokes system coupled with a multi-component Cahn-Hilliard system through a phase-field dependent surface tension force, variable density and viscosity, and the advection term. The classical infinitely thin boundary of separation between two immiscible fluids is replaced by a transition region of a small but finite width, across which the composition of the mixture changes continuously. A constant level set of the phase-field is used to capture the interface between two immiscible fluids. Phase-field methods are capable of computing topological changes such as splitting and merging, and thus have been applied successfully to multi-component fluid flows involving large interface deformations. Practical applications are provided to illustrate the usefulness of using a phase-field method. Computational results of various experiments show the accuracy and effectiveness of phase-field models.

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We develop a conservative, second-order accurate fully implicit discretization of the Navier-Stokes (NS) and CahnHilliard (CH) system that has an associated discrete energy functional. This system provides a diffuse-interface description of binary fluid flows with compressible or incompressible flow components [R. Soc. Lond. Proc. Ser. A Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 454 (1998Sci. 454 ( ) 2617. In this work, we focus on the case of flows containing two immiscible, incompressible and density-matched components. The scheme, however, has a straightforward extension to multi-component systems. To efficiently solve the discrete system at the implicit time-level, we develop a nonlinear multigrid method to solve the CH equation which is then coupled to a projection method that is used to solve the NS equation. We demonstrate convergence of our scheme numerically in both the presence and absence of flow and perform simulations of phase separation via spinodal decomposition. We examine the separate effects of surface tension and external flow on the decomposition. We find surface tension driven flow alone increases coalescence rates through the retraction of interfaces. When there is an applied external shear, the evolution of the flow is nontrivial and the flow morphology repeats itself in time as multiple pinchoff and reconnection events occur. Eventually, the periodic motion ceases and the system relaxes to a global equilibrium. The equilibria we observe appears has a similar structure in all cases although the dynamics of the evolution is quite different. We view the work presented in this paper as preparatory for a detailed investigation of liquid-liquid interfaces with surface tension where the interfaces separate two immiscible fluids [On the pinchoff of liquid-liquid jets with surface tension, in preparation]. To this end, we also include a simulation of the pinchoff of a liquid thread under the Rayleigh instability at finite Reynolds number.

We derive a thermodynamically consistent phase-field model for flows containing three (or more) liquid components. The model is based on a Navier-Stokes (NS) and Cahn-Hilliard system (CH) which accounts for surface tension among the different components and three-phase contact lines. We develop a stable conservative, second order accurate fully implicit discretization of the NS and threephase (ternary) CH system. We use a nonlinear multigrid method to efficiently solve the discrete ternary CH system at the implicit time-level and then couple it to a multigrid/projection method that is used to solve the NS equation. We demonstrate convergence of our scheme numerically and perform numerical simulations to show the accuracy, flexibility, and robustness of this approach. In particular, we simulate a three-interface contact angle resulting from a spreading liquid lens on an interface, a buoyancy-driven compound drop, and the Rayleigh-Taylor instability of a flow with three partially miscible components.

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