A Strategy toward Realizing Narrow Line with High Electrical Conductivity by Electrohydrodynamic Printing

Abstract

Over the past few decades, electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing has proved to be an environmentally friendly, cost-effective and powerful tool in manufacturing electronic devices with a wire width of less than 50 μm. In particular, EHD printing is highly valued for the printing of ultrafine wire-width silver electrodes, which is important in manufacturing large-area, high-resolution micron-scale or even nanoscale structures. In this paper, we compare two methods of surface modification of glass substrate: UV treatment and oxygen plasma treatment. We found that oxygen plasma was better than UV treatment in terms of wettability and uniformity. Secondly, we optimized the annealing temperature parameter, and found that the conductivity of the electrode was the highest at 200 °C due to the smoothing silver electrode and the oxidation-free internal microstructure. Thirdly, we used EHD printing to fabricate silver electrodes on the glass substrate. Due to the decrease of conductivity as a result of the skin effect and the decrease of silver content, we found that driving voltage dropped, line width decreased, and the conductivity of silver line decreased. After the optimization of the EHD printing process, Ag electrode line width and conductivity reached 19.42 ± 0.24 μm and 6.01 × 106 S/m, demonstrating the potential of electro-hydraulic printing in the manufacturing of flexible, wearable, high-density, low-power-consumption electronics.

Fabrication of micro-ultrasonic phased array electrode via electric field-driven printing method

“…As a kind of additive manufacturing technology, the direct printing method can directly deposit conductive structures with various shapes on demand without a mask, such as inkjet printing [18,19] and electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing [20,21]. In particular, EHD printing uses the effect of a high-voltage electric field to eject a jet from the needle, and the jet diameter can be 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than that of the needles [22].…”

High‐Resolution Patterning of Conductive Microstructures by Electrostatic Deposition of Aerosol Au Nanoparticles through the Dielectric Mask

“…[6,7] Traditional printing methods such as inkjet and aerosol jet printing have significant difficulty forming structures smaller than 10 μm, [8,9] since highresolution printing requires smaller nozzles, but smaller nozzles are more likely to clog. [10] Moreover, due to ink spreading, it is not possible to obtain structures with a high aspect ratio (height/ width) of more than 0.1. [11] For this reason, researchers are developing alternative techniques to overcome these limitations.…”

Prediction of Both E-Jet Printing Ejection Cycle Time and Droplet Diameter Based on Random Forest Regression

“…Electrohydrodynamic jet (E-jet) printing is a new additive manufacturing technology in which a fine solution jet is ejected from the tip of a Taylor cone under the action of an electric field [ 1 ] and deposited on a substrate to form a micro-dot pattern. Due to the advantages of direct writing, noncontact, high resolution, and drop-on-demand, E-jet printing has been applied in biological 3D structures, cell-laden microspheres [ 2 , 3 ], light-emitting diodes [ 4 , 5 ], transistors [ 6 , 7 ], transparent electrodes [ 8 , 9 ], optical micro-lenses [ 10 ], sensors [ 11 , 12 , 13 ], flexible electronic devices [ 14 , 15 , 16 ], and other fields. Under constant DC voltage, the ejection cycle time and droplet diameter, together with the substrate moving speed, determine the quality of an E-jet printing pattern.…”