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- Title
Design and Fabrication of an Experimental Microheater Array Powder Sintering Printer.
- Authors
Holt, Nicholas; Zhou, Wenchao
- Abstract
Microheater array powder sintering (MAPS) is a novel additive manufacturing process that uses an array of microheaters to selectively sinter powder particles. MAPS shows great promise as a new method of printing flexible electronics by enabling digital curing of conductive inks on a variety of substrates. For MAPS to work effectively, a microscale air gap needs to be maintained between the heater array and the conductive ink. In this article, we present an experimental MAPS printer with air gap control for printing conductive circuits. First, we discuss design aspects necessary to implement MAPS. An analysis is performed to validate that the design can maintain the desired air gap between the microheaters and the sintering layer, which consists of a silver nanoparticle ink. The printer is tested by printing conductive lines on a flexible plastic substrate with silver nanoparticle ink. Results show MAPS performs on par with or better than the existing fabrication methods for printed electronics in terms of both the print quality (conductivity of the printed line) and print speed, which shows MAPS’ great promise as a competitive new method for digital production of printed electronics.
- Subjects
FABRICATION (Manufacturing); ADDITIVES; ELECTRONICS; ELECTRIC circuits; SILVER nanoparticles
- Publication
JOM: The Journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), 2018, Vol 70, Issue 9, p1785
- ISSN
1047-4838
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11837-018-2796-1