Pressured liquid metal screen printing for rapid manufacture of high resolution electronic patterns

Abstract

In this paper, a pressured liquid metal screen printing method for rapidly manufacturing electronically conductive patterns is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The atomized liquid metal microdroplets are pushed through the mesh openings to wet the target substrate under the airflow force. As the screen is removed away from the substrate, a liquid metal pattern is formed. The width and the thickness of the printed track can reach small values of 233.7 mm and 94.5 mm, respectively, with the surface root mean square roughness of the printed plane at 1.27 mm. With such a printing method, various kinds of complex electronic patterns such as functional circuits, general art drawings etc. can be fabricated in a short time on flexible or rigid substrates with different surface roughnesses. Durability and bending tests are performed to investigate the reliability and mechanical stability of the printed line resistors. In order to illustrate the screen printing of functional electronics, a liquid metal radio frequency identification antenna tag is fabricated with the reflection coefficient measured. Future applications of the liquid metal screen printing technique can be envisaged in flexible printed circuit board manufacturing, paper-based electronics, metal tags, the art of metal calligraphy & painting and so on.

Emerging flexible and wearable physical sensing platforms for healthcare and biomedical applications

“…These materials include polymers 23,24,32 , semiconductors 36 , and metallic conductor-based nanomaterials [37][38][39][40] as well as ionic 41,42,84 and metallic liquids 43,85 . Table 1(B) further provides some of the materials commonly utilized as active sensing elements of flexible sensors with their quantitative specifications.…”

Preparations, Characteristics and Applications of the Functional Liquid Metal Materials

“…[73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85] The functional liquid metals materials with low melting point could be encapsulated in soft materials to form soft conductors with high conductivity, high stretchability, and reconfigurability. [86] With the development of patterning techniques for liquid metals, more and more liquid metal printed or soft electronics emerge, such as antennas, [87,88] RFID tags, [89] capacitors, [90] inductors, [91] temperature measurement circuits, [86] wireless power transfer circuits, [92] acoustic devices, [93] strain sensors, [94] pressure sensors, [95,96] and curvature sensors. [86] With the development of patterning techniques for liquid metals, more and more liquid metal printed or soft electronics emerge, such as antennas, [87,88] RFID tags, [89] capacitors, [90] inductors, [91] temperature measurement circuits, [86] wireless power transfer circuits, [92] acoustic devices, [93] strain sensors, [94] pressure sensors, [95,96] and curvature sensors.…”

“…Here, the functional liquid metal ink is a four-element alloy Bi 35 In 48.6 Sn 15.9 Zn 0.4 . [87] Copyright 2015, Royal Society of Chemistry. a) A diagram of the low-cost computer-controlled printer to illustrate the tapping mode movement of the printing head, the composite fluid mechanics to deliver, transfer and adhere the liquid metal ink to the substrate.…”

“…In order to enhance the stability of the connection between the liquid metal conductors and the soft materials such as PDMS, Wang et al put forward a novel liquid metal dual-trans (the liquid metal transfer printing and the freeze phase transition mechanism) printing strategy and fabricated flexible and functional circuits, as shown in Figure 8d. [86] With the development of patterning techniques for liquid metals, more and more liquid metal printed or soft electronics emerge, such as antennas, [87,88] RFID tags, [89] capacitors, [90] inductors, [91] temperature measurement circuits, [86] wireless power transfer circuits, [92] acoustic devices, [93] strain sensors, [94] pressure sensors, [95,96] and curvature sensors. [97]…”

Gallium-Based Room-Temperature Liquid Metals: Actuation and Manipulation of Droplets and Flows

“…This spraying technique was used for tape transfer printing toward soft microfluidic electronics (Jeong et al, 2015). This method was also applied for droplet generation as the first step of pressure screen printing used in soft electronics (Wang and Liu, 2015) and liquid metal radiation shielding films (Deng and Liu, 2015).…”