Conductive silver inks and their applications in printed and flexible electronics

Abstract

Outline:Conductive inks are widely investigated area in the recent years due to its popularity in printed electronics (PE), flexible electronics (FE) and it comprises specific and unique applications which belong to a whole next level of future technology. In this context, silver is being acutely researched material for its encouraging application in conductive inks. In printing technology silver conductive inks has major role in electronic applications. The emerging integration of different technologies was silver nanoinks. In recent years printed electronics market is being dominated by expensive materials such as gold, platinum etc.which are costly/complex instruments, to overcome these drawbacks silver conductive inks can relieve the current technology. The present printed circuit boards (PCBs) manufactures use complex and expensive techniques to fabricate the circuit boards which in turn levitates the overall cost. Solvent based silver conductive inks are capable to substitute the PCB technology while reducing the cost of manufacturing. Due to its stellar reputation, investors are looking forward to apply this technology in printed electronics industries.2 planet. Silver conductive inks have silver in its nanoform which is an extensively engaging the nanotechnology.Silver in the nanometer range has predominantly occupied the interest of researchers since the beginning of the nanotechnology era. Silver was and is considered a prominent material;and even historically silver has its own importance. This novel material has been prospering in its applications ever since researchers focused on its study in the nanoscale. This led to a promising application in many fields of science and technology. The properties which make silver notable are that it is rare, strong, corrosion resistant, and unaffected by moisture. Silver is also resonant, moldable, malleable, and possesses the highest thermal and electric conductivity of any substance. Silver is one of the strongest oxidants, it is an essential catalyst for chemical process industry.Metal nanoparticles act as a key element in conductive inks. In nano range, silver has gained so much prominence that it does not require any special introduction about its enhanced properties possessed in the nanometer range. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) have been synthesized using different types of approaches and each type of synthesis has its own advantages and disadvantages. Silver has unique and enhanced properties in the nanometer range by possessing highest electrical conductivity per unit volume when compared to any other metal, so it is expected to be used extensively in printed electronics technology. In this review we try to bring out the possible ways which were successful in synthesis of conductive ink derived from silver nanomaterial. This work is an attempt to understand the significance of silver based conductive inks and motivate researchers who opt to bring a change in future electronics. We focussed this review in gathering a brief preface of all the possible metho...

Modelling of a vacuum metallization patterning method for organic electronics

“…The roughness and electrical characteristics of the patterned aluminum is equivalent to aluminum thin film coatings [21]. This makes the selective metallization technique attractive, as some ambient solution based printing methods, such as silver inks, do not achieve this conductivity with the same thickness and the printed solute can be quite rough [22,23]. Furthermore they require more chemical control, for solvent orthogonality, and use costly materials.…”

Advances in the Development of Liquid Metal-Based Printed Electronic Inks

“…Typical metal-based conductive inks include metal (e.g., Au, Ag, Pt, Cu) nanoparticle dispersion and metal compound precursor solution. Among them, Ag-based nanoink has gained special research interest due to its moderate price compared with Au and Pt (Lee et al, 2005;Rao et al, 2015), as well as its high electrical conductivity after sintering (Kwon et al, 2018;Glier et al, 2019). The typical sintering process lasts for up to 60 min at heating temperatures ranging between 125 and 250 • C, which limits the practical applications of the Ag-based nanoink on heatsensitive flexible substrates (Mou et al, 2018).…”

Nebulized jet-based printing of bio-electrical scaffolds for neural tissue engineering: a feasibility study

“…According to the main objective of the paper (namely, a feasibility study on combining the fields of PE and neural tissue engineering), a commonly used PE ink, specifically customized for nebulized jet printing techniques, was selected. It is a commercial silver nanoparticle (AgNP; Ø particle size ∼100 nm) ink; AgNP suspensions are, in fact, the most widely adopted engineered inks in PE, due to their high conductivity and printing versatility [50].…”