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Printed Metal Conductors
November 25, 2019
The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program awarded $1m to fund research to replace ITO with metal "microgrid" conductors to improve OLED performance. The research will be led by Paul Leu, Ph.D., associate professor of industrial engineering at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering, and Electroninks, a technology company in Austin, Texas. Leu first came across the Electronink's metal ink in its circuit drawing kit called Circuit Scribe. The device includes a pen that uses conductive silver ink to allow users to create working lights with circuits drawn on paper. Leu, whose lab works with transparent electrodes, saw the product and understood that the company's particle-free, metal ink might be able to address some of the limitations with ITO. "Electronink's metal ink can cure at low temperatures, be printed into patterns, and has conductivity comparable to bulk metal," says Leu. "By using a new metal patterning technique that prints the metal grid directly on glass or plastic, we can create 'microgrid' conductors that can outperform ITO at a lower manufacturing cost." Leu and Electroninks began the project in 2018, working for a year in a proof-of- Ziyu Zhou, lead graduate student on the project said, "We were able to achieve high performance, with transparency over 90 percent and sheet resistance under 1 ohm per square."
Figure 1: Conductive Metal Ink Illustration
November 25, 2019
The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program awarded $1m to fund research to replace ITO with metal "microgrid" conductors to improve OLED performance. The research will be led by Paul Leu, Ph.D., associate professor of industrial engineering at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering, and Electroninks, a technology company in Austin, Texas. Leu first came across the Electronink's metal ink in its circuit drawing kit called Circuit Scribe. The device includes a pen that uses conductive silver ink to allow users to create working lights with circuits drawn on paper. Leu, whose lab works with transparent electrodes, saw the product and understood that the company's particle-free, metal ink might be able to address some of the limitations with ITO. "Electronink's metal ink can cure at low temperatures, be printed into patterns, and has conductivity comparable to bulk metal," says Leu. "By using a new metal patterning technique that prints the metal grid directly on glass or plastic, we can create 'microgrid' conductors that can outperform ITO at a lower manufacturing cost." Leu and Electroninks began the project in 2018, working for a year in a proof-of- Ziyu Zhou, lead graduate student on the project said, "We were able to achieve high performance, with transparency over 90 percent and sheet resistance under 1 ohm per square."
Figure 1: Conductive Metal Ink Illustration
Source: Swanson School of Engineering