Highly Conductive Custom Inks for Aerospace Applications

There were four objectives to the research undertaken: improvement of carbon based resistive inks suitable for inkjet deposition, development of carbon based resistive inks that have low (less than 150C) cure temperature, development of silver nanomaterial ink for transparent conductive coatings, and exploration of inkjettable materials for semiconductor devices. The first objective achieved a cost effective all carbon ink capable of ~100 ohm/square in a single inkjetted layer and ~30 ohm/square (7.83E-03 ohm-cm volume resistivity) with three layers with reliable jetting and kilogram scale production capacity. Development of low cure temperature carbon inks was rendered unnecessary by the successful development of an alternative cure process using low temperature drying followed by UV flashlamp curing. Silver nanomaterial and silver complex inks were manufactured in Xactiv's lab and achieved ~80% transparency with single digit ohm/square conductivity, but did not exhibit performance improvement over commercially available nanomaterials. The effort to explore inkjettable materials for semiconductors revealed more materials development work is needed before inkjettable semiconductors can be produced in commercial quantity, non-lab environments.