Conductive silver ink printing through the laser-induced forward transfer technique

[INVITED] Laser-induced forward transfer: A high resolution additive manufacturing technology

“…Inkjet processes are widely used for this purpose but there are still some limitations (low viscosity inks only, head clogging, resolution, minimum feature size at high velocity) that should be overcome by using laser printing. Some studies have demonstrated the potential of LIFT to print conductive lines from silver nanoparticle ink donor substrates [20,23]. The deposition of uniform width lines requires at optimization of the overlap value which depends on the properties of the liquid and the receiver surface [95].…”

“…After the printing of the ink lines, a sintering step at temperatures of 150°C or higher is required to fuse the nanoparticules in a continuous conductive line of silver. Lines narrower than 20 mm were printed on a wide range of substrates, including flexible, with resistivity as low as 20 mΩ cm [20,21].…”

“…Successfully LIFT-printed materials include deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) [7], active optical structure [8,9], polymers [10,11], biomaterials [12,13], nanotubes [14], graphene [15], metals [16,17], particles [18,19] and inks [20][21][22][23]. This process is a single-step direct printing technique that offers the ability to perform surface micro patterning and localized deposition of almost any material.…”

Continuous-Wave Laser-Induced Transfer of Metal Nanoparticles to Arbitrary Polymer Substrates

“…The LIFT process utilizes a pulsed laser beam as a driving force to transfer the material from the donor substrate to the acceptor substrate, which are in proximity [17,18]. The NPs transferred by a single pulse have a circular shape in general [19], and therefore, the single transfer has to be repeated at specific laser parameters and a proper hatch size to integrate each droplet and create continuous features [20,21]. Furthermore, unlike the SLS process, additional heat treatment is essential for these metal NPs to function properly as electrodes [20,22].…”

Desarrollo de procesos para formación de contactos con láser para módulos thin film CIGS para aplicaciones fotovoltaicas

“…When printing lines with Newtonian liquids by LIFT, the shift of pitch distance (center to center distance) also affects the formation of the line uniformity and continuity [106,107]. When the pitch distance is shorter than the diameter of the droplet, coalesce appears which results in a dashed line.…”