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Additive manufacturing is more widely used these days in aerospace, power industry, and automotive. The latest reports indicate that electronics can be produced with this technique. This approach requires the development of new materials for the fabrication of conductive metallic layers on polymers. Herein, a hybrid technique based on fused deposition modeling, direct‐write, and selective laser sintering is demonstrated, for the fabrication of structural electronics. Highly conductive paths are obtained with conductivity values up to 3.2·106 S m−1 in a single printing and sintering additive process. The influence of process parameters is evaluated with several 3D printed polymer substrates affecting the electrical conductivity of the printed conductive paths and circuits. The developed hybrid technique allows performing selective thermal sintering of metallic pastes on polymer substrates exhibiting the value of melting temperatures much lower than the sintering temperature of the silver paste. This phenomenon can be explained with the proposed hypothesis that the activation energy of the sintering process of metallic paste and degradation of polymer substrate plays a key role in obtaining functional conductive metallic paths on polymer substrates. Application of the developed process is demonstrated with a simple human interface device and a circuit with light‐emitting diodes and power source.

A new era of composite organic materials, nanomaterials, and printed electronics is emerging to the applications of thermoelectric generators (TEGs). Special attention is focused on carbon nanomaterials and conducting polymers, and the possibility to form pastes and inks for various low-cost deposition techniques. In this work, we present a novel approach to the processing of composite materials for screen-printing based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and polyaniline (PANI), supported with a dielectric polymer vehicle. Three different types of such tailor-made materials were prepared, with a functional phase consisted of carbon nanotubes and polyaniline composites fabricated with two methods: dry mixing of PANI CNT powders and in situ polymerisation of PANI with CNT. These materials were printed on flexible polymer substrates, exhibiting outstanding mechanical properties. The best parameters obtained for elaborated materials were σ=405.45 S·m−1, S=15.4 μV·K−1, and PF=85.2 nW·m−1K−2, respectively.

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With the development of the miniaturization of electronic systems, heat dissipation from components has become an increasing challenge. Structural electronics represent a new approach to this problem. Instead of downsizing all the elements, in this idea, electronic parts of the device are embedded into its mechanical construction. This approach has many advantages, but the reliability of systems constructed this way has not been extensively studied so far. In this work, circuits consisting of silver ink conductive traces were printed on FDM polymer substrates, with or without 0 Ω resistors, and were subjected to accelerated aging testing. The samples were divided into three groups, and for each of them, the mean time to failure was calculated, which for the best group was 8000 h. This paper also presents the mechanism that led to the failure of these systems, as well as actions that will lead to the elimination of this phenomenon.