Supercooling of Homogeneous Liquid Phase of Liquid Metals and Alloys &amp;mdash;Poor Supercooling around the Eutectic Composition of Liquid Ni-Nb System&amp;mdash;

Itami, Toshio; Okada, Junpei; Watanabe, Yūki; Ishikawa, Takehiko; Yoda, Shinichi

doi:10.2320/matertrans.maw201025

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The maximum temperature at which the film freezes has been consistently observed to be 13 °C (measured directly on the film) which is lower than the nominal melting point of EGaIn, 15 °C. This can be explained by the well-known supercooling nature of Ga [44] particularly at small size scales. The pictures of different stages of the film freezing are given in Figure S3a-c of the Supporting Information.…”

Section: Wileyonlinelibrarycommentioning

confidence: 99%

Freeze‐Printing of Liquid Metal Alloys for Manufacturing of 3D, Conductive, and Flexible Networks

Gannarapu

Gozen

2016

Adv Materials Technologies

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liquid metal alloys including injection of liquid metals into elastomeric channel networks, [10][11][12][13][14] freeze-casting, [15] surface patterning using lithographic techniques, [16][17][18][19] laser engraving, [20] or additive approaches including flow-based direct-writing, [21,22] droplet-by-droplet deposition, [23] heated roller-pen printing, [24,25] ink-jetting, [26] deposition at microscale in the nanoparticle ink form, followed by sintering, [27] or combination of direct-writing and transfer printing. [28] These methods have been utilized to realize various flexible electronic components including interconnects, [10,29] passive circuitry, [11] diodes and memristors, [30,31] antennas for wireless communication, [21,32,33] and wearable force and pressure sensors. [12,34] Despite their demonstrated success, the 3D geometric capability of these methods is still limited. The geometric capability of the injection and lithography is determined by that of the 2D methods used to fabricate the elastomeric channel networks, stencils or stamps. The additive manufacturing methods provide a higher level of geometric capability, however, still are mostly limited to 2D planar designs since the liquid metal cannot maintain its mechanical stability as complex 3D structures. Using these methods, obtaining a limited range of 3D designs still require a number of rigorous process steps including molding, metal injection and vacuuming, as well as layer bonding. In a recent study, Ladd et al. showed that the moldability of liquid metal alloys can be utilized to form vertically extended structures in mm-level sizes, [22] demonstrating the promise for true 3D-printing using liquid metals. However, as also demonstrated in this work, the structural stability of the oxide skin is not sufficient to form complex 3D networks of liquid metal alloys in practical size scales. A number of recent studies combined liquid metal and elastomer printing to build multilayer planar networks of liquid metals where the printed elastomer essentially used as the support material. [35][36][37] Even though these studies improved the geometric capability of additive manufacturing of EGaIn networks, printing of EGaIn along truly 3D paths in a continuous fashion has not been realized. Realization of such a printing method will enable high-density 3D interconnect networks, antennae, and passive circuitry for flexible electronics with substantially increased design complexity.In this paper, we present the freeze-printing method to address this need. This method is schematically described in Figure 1a-d. Here, the liquid metal alloy, EGaIn is dispensed from a nozzle on a substrate, the temperature of which is kept below the melting point of the alloy. As the nozzle is translated in 3D, more liquid is added to the printed structure along the translation path and maintains its cylindrical shape owing to the spontaneous formation and deformation of the oxide skin. In the meantime, the printed structure starts freezing from the substrate generating a moving f...

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Section: Wileyonlinelibrarycommentioning

confidence: 99%

Freeze‐Printing of Liquid Metal Alloys for Manufacturing of 3D, Conductive, and Flexible Networks

Gannarapu

Gozen

2016

Adv Materials Technologies

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“…Microparticles formed from low melting point metals, such as the eutectic alloy of gallium and indium (EGaIn; MP = 15.3 uC), 1 hold great promise for a variety of novel applications including energy harvesting, 2 heat transfer fluids, 3 self-healing circuits, 4 and as substrates to study supercooling. 5 Microfluidic flowfocusing can produce microdroplets composed of liquid metal alloys with improved control over droplet size and monodispersity 6 relative to conventional methods including sonication, shearing, or reactions in solution. 3,4,7,8 Here, we build upon this promising approach by studying droplet formation and demonstrating new ways to stabilize and destabilize these droplets.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of the production and reversible stability of EGaIn liquid metal microspheres using flow focusing

2012

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This manuscript describes an experimental study of the production of micro-scale droplets of the room-temperature liquid alloy eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn) formed using a microfluidic flow-focusing device. The EGaIn surface oxidizes readily to form a passivating oxide "skin" that imparts some mechanical stability to the resulting microspheres, but does not appear to affect the dynamics of droplet formation. EGaIn has an interfacial tension nearly an order of magnitude larger than typical water-in-oil systems that are used to study droplet production in microfluidic flow-focusing devices. The size of the microdroplets increase as the ratio of the flow rates of the dispersed and continuous-phase increase for both EGaIn-in-glycerol and water-in-oil systems; however, these fluid pairs form droplets through different dispersing modes at otherwise identical flow conditions (i.e., flow rate ratios and capillary numbers). Consequently, the EGaIn droplets are larger than the water droplets. The difference in dispersing modes and droplet size are attributed to the relatively larger interfacial and inertial forces of the EGaIn system compared to the water-in-oil system. The addition of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), which is known to bind to oxide surfaces, to the continuous phase yields stable, monodisperse emulsions of liquid metal. These emulsions can be destabilized on demand by changing the solution pH, allowing the liquid metal to be recovered. The ability of the PVA to bind to the liquid metal also influences droplet production by changing the shape of the liquid as it approaches the orifice of the flow focusing device, which results in droplets with smaller diameters relative to those formed without PVA.

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Non-conventional techniques to characterize complex SAGD emulsions and dilution effects on emulsion stabilization

Balsamo

Nguyen

Phan

2014

Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering

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Supercooling of Homogeneous Liquid Phase of Liquid Metals and Alloys —Poor Supercooling around the Eutectic Composition of Liquid Ni-Nb System—

Cited by 6 publications

References 22 publications

Freeze‐Printing of Liquid Metal Alloys for Manufacturing of 3D, Conductive, and Flexible Networks

Freeze‐Printing of Liquid Metal Alloys for Manufacturing of 3D, Conductive, and Flexible Networks

A study of the production and reversible stability of EGaIn liquid metal microspheres using flow focusing

Non-conventional techniques to characterize complex SAGD emulsions and dilution effects on emulsion stabilization

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