Home // CENICS 2016, The Ninth International Conference on Advances in Circuits, Electronics and Micro-electronics // View article

Novel Conductive Inks for 3D Printing

Authors:
Ayala Kabla
Leo Schranzhofer
Abd El Razek
Fernando de la Vega

Keywords: printed electronics, 3D printing, silver ink, UV curable ink, curing, sintering, photonic sintering

Abstract:
UV (ultraviolet) curable nanoparticle conductive inks for 3D printing present a novel solution for production of a wide variety of parts with integrated conductive circuits. Such inks are difficult to design due to the complex tradeoff between achieving high conductivity, obtainable by a high metal content ink, and requiring low ink viscosity in order to meet jetting requirements. Adding to that is the complexity of managing the competing curing and sintering processes of the printed polymer and metal constituents. In the current work, UV curable nanoparticle conductive inks have been formulated and tested by different curing and sintering techniques. It has been demonstrated that a low resistivity of less than 10 times the silver bulk resistivity is attainable by thermal sintering, even with non-conductive organic content of 60%. Photonic sintering demonstrated the ability to obtain a resistivity of below 60 times the silver bulk resistivity, which is higher than the resistivity obtained by thermal sintering, but achievable in shorter processing times within milliseconds.

Pages: 22 to 26

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: July 24, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-426X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-496-1

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from July 24, 2016 to July 28, 2016