J. W. Sears, V. Kalanovic, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, Rapid City, SD
Direct Printing (Write) has been developed over the last ten year for direct fabrication of electronic devices that can be place on conformal surfaces. To the most part the technology has been applied for surface structures with the print head in a vertical orientation to the surface. Some system have the capability to manually adjust from the vertical position. This presentation presents how the Direct Printing technology can be applied within a Flexible Robotic Environment (FRE). With FRE, directly printed devices can be applied to air foils, hemispheres and other contoured shapes at accuracies of less then 10 microns.
Flexible electrical devices have been developed using various direct write techniques to deposit micron-resolution conductive patterns onto various substrates ranging from glass to plastic or even paper. These direct write techniques use nanometer sized particles in a suspension or slurry that are deposited onto the substrate and cured or sintered to increase the cohesion of the particles to increase the physical and electrical properties of the deposition. The sintering of particles is driven by both temperature and time. So the desired properties of a given deposition can be achieve by either raising the deposition and the substrate to a high temperature for a shorter period of time or a low temperature for a longer period of time.
The capabilities of both FRE and Direct Printing (Write) will be presented.
Summary: Direct Printing (Write) has been developed over the last ten year for direct fabrication of electronic devices that can be place on conformal surfaces. To the most part the technology has been applied for surface structures with the print head in a vertical orientation to the surface. Some system have the capability to manually adjust from the vertical position. This presentation presents how the Direct Printing technology can be applied within a Flexible Robotic Environment (FRE). With FRE, directly printed devices can be applied to air foils, hemispheres and other contoured shapes at accuracies of less then 10 microns.