Intermetallic wetting enabled high resolution liquid metal patterning for 3D and flexible electronics

Johnston, Lucy; Yang, Jiong; Han, Jialuo; Kalantar‐zadeh, Kourosh; Tang, Jianbo

doi:10.1039/d1tc04877e

Cited by 57 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…2 c. In this work, the size limitation is 0.3 mm due to the resolution of laser engraving and high surface tension of the LM. However, the size limitation for electronics printing can be further improved with the advanced laser fabrication or other lithographic method [ 29 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…S2. Generally, the adhesion ability can be used to measure the attraction between liquid and solid or required energy of separate interface reversibly [ 29 ], and the work of adhesion of LM to a solid surface W SL can be calculated by the Young-Dupre equation as the following where W SL is the work of adhesion between solid–liquid interface, σ LG is the surface tension of the liquid–gas interface, θ is the contact angle. It can be concluded that larger surface tension and a smaller value of contact angle will produce a stronger work of adhesion, which lead to a better performance in the adhesion and wetting abilities of the liquid (LM) to a solid surface (substrates).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Besides, the process of photolithography is the most common process to fabricate LM circuits currently. However, the large-scale promotion of LM soft electronics fabricating still needs to explore because of the mentioned high-cost and inefficient processes [ 29 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Construction of liquid metal-based soft microfluidic sensors via soft lithography

Yang

Duan

et al. 2022

J Nanobiotechnol

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Background Liquid metal (LM) can be integrated into microfluidic channel, bringing new functionalities of microfluidics and opening a new window for soft microfluidic electronics, due to the superior advantages of the conductivity and deformability of LMs. However, patterning the LMs into microfluidic channels requires either selective surface wetting or complex fabrication process. Results In this work, we develop a method to pattern the LMs onto the soft elastomer via soft lithographic process for fabrication of soft microfluidic sensors without the surface modification, bulky facilities, and complicated processes. The combination of the interfacial hydrogen bond and surface tension enables the LM patterns transfer to the soft elastomer. The transferred LM patterns with an ellipse-like cross-section further improve the stability under the mechanical deformation. Three proof-of-concept experiments were conducted to demonstrate the utilization of this method for development of thermochromic sensors, self-powered capacity sensors and flexible biosensor for glucose detection. Conclusions In summary, the proposed method offers a new patterning method to obtain soft microfluidic sensors and brings new possibilities for microfluidics-related wearable devices. Graphical Abstract

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Construction of liquid metal-based soft microfluidic sensors via soft lithography

Yang

Duan

et al. 2022

J Nanobiotechnol

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“…However, it always needs extremely complex, high‐cost, and repetitive electron‐beam/optical lithography in these reports. [ 27,43–44 ] This is because these reported active metals (e.g., Cu/Ni/Fe/Ag) for LMs’ plating usually exhibit weak adhesion to the elastic substrates (e.g., poly(dimethylsiloxane), polyurethane). When LMs were directly deposited onto these metals, they would be easily corrupted or dissolved by LMs due to the high alloying interaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interfacial Engineering for Highly Stable and Stretchable Electrodes Enabled by Printing/Writing Surface‐Embedded Silver and Its Selective Alloying with Liquid Metals

Liu

Song

Shi

et al. 2022

Adv Materials Inter

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To overcome the first hurdle, the gallium-indium based liquid metals (LMs) were widely researched due to their intrinsically high deformabilities and conductivities. [26][27][28] However, the big surface tension of the LMs (0.6-0.7 N m -1 , ten times to water) as well as their weak interfacial interaction with polymer substrates makes them tough to be directly printed or coated on the elastic substrates. [29][30][31][32] To improve the interfacial adhesion of LMs to elastic substrates, two typical interaction techniques have been reported as concluded in Table S1 (Supporting Information). First of all, the mostly used interaction is the hydrogen bonding or van der Waals interaction. [4,[33][34][35][36][37][38] In this technology, LMs were usually downsized into smaller length scales (i.e., liquid metal micro/nanoparticles) with dispensing agents such as polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), [4] tannic acid (TA), alginate, [35,39] and poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP). And elastic substrates were also modified using polar components, such as polymethacrylates (PMA) [33,40] and ethyl-2-cyanoacrylate. The hydrogen bonding or van der Waals interaction between them can help the LMs adhere onto the substrates, but these bondings strictly rely on the formation of oxide or organic layer, which are weak, static, and nonstretchable in the practical deformations (e.g., periodic and dynamic deformations).Besides, LM-metal plating technique is the other efficient interfacial modification technique. In this technique, LMs can plate on some active metals (e.g., Cu/Ni/Fe/Ag) to form new LM-metal alloys (e.g., Ga-Cu alloy, Ga-Ni alloy, and In-Ag alloy). [41][42] Compared to the hydrogen bond and van der Waals interaction, the LM-metal plating technique shows bigger advantages in future stretchable electrodes as it does not need the brittle oxide layer. The high alloying interaction between the pure LMs and the active metals can simultaneously improve the conductivity, stretchability, and dynamic stability. In this case, LM-metal plating technique has been proposed in previous reports. However, it always needs extremely complex, highcost, and repetitive electron-beam/optical lithography in these reports. [27,[43][44] This is because these reported active metals (e.g., Cu/Ni/Fe/Ag) for LMs' plating usually exhibit weak adhesion to the elastic substrates (e.g., poly(dimethylsiloxane), Even though intrinsically stretchable liquid metals (LMs) have been widely used in the stretchable electrodes for improving the stretchability, it is still challenging to achieve stable interfaces in these electrodes. A usual approach of adhering the LMs on a substrate is to modify the LMs with an organic surfactant, which is easily ruptured under a dynamic deformation. Herein, a surface-embedded silver and its selective alloying of LMs are reported to address this problem. Typically, the surface-embedding structure and the alloying interaction are both robust and stretchable, enabling the high interfacial stability during deformation (the ability to resist peeling, sc...

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“…The room-temperature liquid metal (LM, gallium alloys) has been widely concerned due to its low-temperature melting point, high thermal and electrical conductivities, and non-toxicity [ 7 , 8 ]. LM has been widely applied to biomedical technology [ 9 , 10 ], flexible electronics [ 11 , 12 , 13 ], soft machines [ 14 , 15 ], high heat-flux thermal management [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ], and energy harvesting [ 20 ]. The gallium-based LM has been also used as stretchable electrodes to WTEG due to its excellent fluidity [ 20 , 21 , 22 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Liquid Metal-Enhanced Wearable Thermoelectric Generator

Liu¹,

Li²,

Yang³

et al. 2022

Bioengineering

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It is a key challenge to continuously power personal wearable health monitoring systems. This paper reports a novel liquid metal-enhanced wearable thermoelectric generator (LM-WTEG that directly converts body heat into electricity for powering the wearable sensor system. The gallium-based liquid metal alloys with room-temperature melting point (24~30 °C) and high latent heat density (about 500 MJ/m3) are used to design a new flexible finned heat sink, which not only absorbs the heat through the solid-liquid phase change of the LM and enhances the heat release to the ambient air due to its high thermal conduction. The LM finned is integrated with WTEG to present high biaxial flexibility, which could be tightly in contact with the skin. The LM-WTEG could achieve a super high output power density of 275 μW/cm2 for the simulated heat source (37 °C) with the natural convective heat transfer condition. The energy management unit, the multi-parameter sensors (including temperature, humidity, and accelerometer), and Bluetooth module with a total energy consumption of about 65 μW are designed, which are fully powered from LM-WTEG through harvesting body heat.

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Intermetallic wetting enabled high resolution liquid metal patterning for 3D and flexible electronics

Abstract: Liquid metals, highly conductive and flowable metals, are increasingly becoming versatile choices for soft electronics and wearable devices. High resolution liquid metal patterning strategies accommodative to different substrate materials and...

Cited by 57 publications

References 49 publications

Construction of liquid metal-based soft microfluidic sensors via soft lithography

Construction of liquid metal-based soft microfluidic sensors via soft lithography

Interfacial Engineering for Highly Stable and Stretchable Electrodes Enabled by Printing/Writing Surface‐Embedded Silver and Its Selective Alloying with Liquid Metals

A Liquid Metal-Enhanced Wearable Thermoelectric Generator

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