Fully Additive Manufacturing of Passive Circuit Elements using Aerosol Jet Printing

• Main Authors: Enakerakpo, Emuobosan, Alhendi, Mohammed, Khinda, Gurvinder Singh, Garakani, Behnam, Sandekelum Somarathna, K. Udara, Poliks, Mark, Gonya, Stephen, Basava, Venugopala
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Additive Manufacturing (AM); Additives; Aerosol jet printing (AJP) carbon nano structures (CNS); Aerosols; Area measurement; Capacitors; Ink; Resistors; Three-dimensional printing
• ISSN: 2377-5726
• DOI: 10.1109/ECTC32696.2021.00186

Printed electronics is taking advantage of the industry shift in manufacturing processes from conventional subtractive manufacturing to additive manufacturing (AM). Although aerosol jet printing process has shown promise in its application in AM, it is currently challenging to print some defined functional components due to many non-controllable factors. In this paper, we demonstrated an entirely additive manufactured circuit which included substrate manufacturing and printed electrical components. The substrate was fabricated using 3D stereolithography (SLA) while the electrical components (resistors and capacitors) were fabricated using aerosol jet printing (AJP). The capacitors were printed using commercially available conductive silver and dielectric inks. Resistor elements were printed with a newly formulated carbon nanostructure (CNS) based ink. In conclusion, we were able to circumvent the challenges associated with the AJP using design techniques, that allowed us print reproducible R/C components. Printed resistors measured \sim 0.94 \mathrm{K}\Omega (target value is 1.0\ \mathrm{K}\Omega ) and capacitors measured ∼1.3 nF (target value is 1.0nF).