Thursday, May 23, 2013: Gone are the days when flexible electronics used to be beyond imagination. But now we have a technology that can help in producing electronics, which can actually be folded! Can you believe that? Northwestern University of Illinois has created printable ink based on Graphene, which can help in producing flexible electronics.
Graphene is well known for its high conductivity and mechanical flexibility. It boasts of a great amount of chemical stability too. This means one can create thin layers of the flexible material that can also bend. It can also be used for making circuits out of various kinds of materials. In order to produce it, researchers and scientists have broken graphene into several pieces like graphite. In order to make the above process a success, oxidation is necessary. But those results come in reduced conductivity of the graphene. Exfoliating the graphene can reduce the need of oxidizing it. Solvents are also necessary to avoid the process of oxidation.
The scientists of the Northwestern University have used ethanol as well as ethyl cellulose in order to perform the process of exfoliation. It hardly affects the conductivity and leaves least amount of residue. The product is a good concentration of the nanometer sized wonderful flakes of the graphene. It is then mingled with another solvent to create the ink, which is used for inkjet printers.
The new technology of using graphene has already been tested. 14-nanometer sized conductive patterns have been created by printing of multilayer patterns of ink on a flexible substrate. Although the substrate had been tested to bend to a certain degree, there were no signs of alterations to be seen in its conductivity.
