Additive manufacturing methods have shown great potentials to substitute the costly and time‐consuming conventional subtractive methods in the processing of electronically conductive materials for applications in flexible and stretchable electronics. Herein, additive manufacturing of highly conductive, sandwich‐structured conductors with high‐temperature processibility and versatility in applicable substrates is reported. The sandwich‐structured conductors with silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) as electronic conductors and polyimide (PI) as encapsulation are layer‐by‐layer deposited by aerosol printing into PI/Ag/PI composites. A high annealing temperature of 250 °C contributes to the high electronic conductivity of the Ag layer at 1.14 × 107 S m−1, which is in the same order of magnitude to the conductivity of bulk Ag at 6.3 × 107 S m−1. The high annealing temperature also significantly improves the interfacial bonding between the Ag and PI layers. For applications in flexible and stretchable electronics, the sandwich‐structured conductors are transferrable to various substrates through a thiol−epoxy bonding process, including polystyrene (PS), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), Kapton, and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) thin films. The sandwich‐structured conductors transferred to flexible and stretchable substrates exhibit highly retained electronic conductivity under deformations such as bending and stretching.
Currently,
light-based three-dimensional (3D) printing with submicron
features is mainly developed based on photosensitive polymers or inorganic-polymer
composite materials. To eliminate polymer/organic additives, a strategy
for direct 3D assembly and printing of metallic nanocrystals without
additives is presented. Ultrafast laser with intensity in the range
of 1 × 1010 to 1 × 1012 W/cm2 is used to nonequilibrium heat nanocrystals and induce ligand transformation,
which triggers the spontaneous fusion and localized assembly of nanocrystals.
The process is due to the operation of hot electrons as confirmed
by a strong dependence of the printing rate on laser pulse duration
varied in the range of electron–phonon relaxation time. Using
the developed laser-induced ligand transformation (LILT) process,
direct printing of 3D metallic structures at micro and submicron scales
is demonstrated. Facile integration with other microscale additive
manufacturing for printing 3D devices containing multiscale features
is also demonstrated.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.