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Topic Name: Princeton Researchers Developed New Technique Allows Larger, Less Expensive Fast Printing of Microscopic Electronics

Category: Chemical

Research persons: Ilhan Aksay, Sibel Korkut

Location: School of Engineering and Applied Science, Princeton University, United States

Details

A new technique for printing extraordinarily thin lines quickly over wide areas could lead to larger, less expensive and more versatile electronic displays as well new medical devices, sensors and other technologies.

Solving a fundamental and long-standing quandary, chemical engineers at School of Engineering and Applied Science, Princeton University developed a method for shooting stable jets of electrically charged liquids from a wide nozzle. The technique, which produced lines just 100 nanometers wide (about one ten-thousandth of a millimeter), offers at least 10 times better resolution than ink-jet printing and far more speed and ease than conventional nanotechnology.

“It is a liquid delivery system on a micro scale,” said Ilhan Aksay, professor of chemical engineering. “And it becomes a true writing technology.”

Aksay and graduate student Sibel Korkut published the results Jan. 25 in Physical Review Letters. The paper also includes as a co-author Dudley Saville, a chemical engineering professor who initiated the project but died in 2006. The research was funded by grants from the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Developing a deep understanding of the fundamental physics behind the process rather than building highly specialized equipment, the researchers were able to use a nozzle that is half a millimeter wide, or 5,000 times wider than the lines it produced.

The key to the process is something called an “electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet” -- a stream of liquid forced from a nozzle by a very strong electric field. Such jets were first investigated in 1917 and are now commonly used in a variety of industrial processes. However, one of the main features of EHD jets is that the stream of liquid becomes unstable soon after it leaves the nozzle and either whips around uncontrollably or breaks up into fine liquid drops. Engineers have used these effects to their advantage in spinning fibers and in industrial electrospray painting, but the reason for the whipping instability, and thus any hope of stopping it, has been a long-standing problem.

In the early part of this decade, two researchers working independently -- Princeton graduate student Hak Poon and Cornell University physicist Harold Craighead -- found that the jet was stable for a very short distance after leaving the nozzle, but the result was still not practical and the reasons were still elusive.

“To understand how to control the jet in any engineering application we had to understand why this was happening,” Aksay said.

Korkut took up the challenge and worked for nearly six years to nail down the mechanisms at play. In the end, she found that a key factor was that the liquid jet was transferring some of its electrical charge to the surrounding gas, which breaks into charged particles and carries some of the electrical current. Korkut’s predecessors and other scientists had looked only at the density of the electrical charges on the surface of the liquid jet.

Expanding her view of the system led Korkut to a simple way to control the stability of the jet by changing the gas and the amount of water vapor. She was able to produce an extremely straight and stable jet more than 8 millimeters from the nozzle.

The result is highly practical not only because of the fineness of the stream but also because the large size of the nozzle and the distance from the nozzle to the printed surface will prevent clogs or jams.

Aksay said a chief use for the technique could be in printing electrically conducting organic polymers (plastics) that could be the basis for large electronic devices. Conventional techniques for making wires of that size (100 nanometers) require laboriously etching the lines with a beam of electrons, which can only be done in very small areas. The new technique can lay down lines at the rate of meters per second as opposed to millionths of a meter per second.

Another application would be to use a liquid that solidifies into a fiber for making precise three-dimensional lattices. Such a product could be used as a scaffold to promote blood clotting in wounds and in other medical devices.

Princeton University has filed for a patent on the discovery and has licensed rights to Vorbeck Materials Corp., a specialty chemical company based in Maryland.

“Electronics is a huge potential application for this discovery,” said John Lettow, president of Vorbeck and a 1995 chemical engineering alumnus of Princeton. “The printing technique could greatly increase the size of video displays and the speed with which high performance displays are made.” Lettow said the technique also could be used in creating large sensors that collect information over a wide area, such as a sensor printed onto an airplane wing to detect metal fatigue.

For Korkut, publishing the results in the premier physics journal marks a gratifying conclusion to years of painstaking work that offered no guarantee of a practical answer. “You are digging into a hole and you don’t know if you will hit the bottom,” Korkut said. “You could just keep on digging.”

Even though she began to see improved stability of the jet after five years, she still did not have a precise handle on the causes. Aksay and Saville pressed her to have a deeper understanding before publishing the results.

“It took more than a year after we saw the clues. We had to look at many possibilities,” Korkut said.

Aksay said Korkut succeeded because of her persistence. “If you give up too soon, you can’t come up with a breakthrough.”

Note for Inkjet Printers
Inkjet printers operate by propelling various size (mostly tiny) droplets of liquid or molten material (ink) onto almost any media. They are the most common type of computer printer for the general consumer due to their low cost, high quality of output, capability of printing in vivid color, and ease of use.
Like most modern technologies, the present-day inkjet has built on the progress made by many earlier versions. Among many contributors, Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Canon can claim a substantial share of credit for the development of the modern inkjet. In the worldwide consumer market, four manufacturers account for the majority of inkjet printer sales: Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, and Lexmark.
The emerging Ink jet material deposition market also uses ink jet technologies, typically piezoelectric ink jets, to deposit materials directly on substrates.
The basic problem with inkjet inks are the conflicting requirements for a colouring agent that will stay on the surface and rapid dispersement of the carrier fluid.
Desktop inkjet printers, as used in offices or at home, all use aqueous inks based on a mixture of water, glycol and dyes or pigments. These inks are inexpensive to manufacture, but are difficult to control on the surface of media, often requiring specially coated media. Aqueous inks are mainly used in printers with disposable, so-called thermal inkjet heads, as these heads require water in order to perform.
Compared to earlier consumer-oriented colour printers, inkjets have a number of advantages. They are quieter in operation than impact dot matrix or daisywheel printers. They can print finer, smoother details through higher printhead resolution, and many consumer inkjets with photographic-quality printing are widely available.

Note for Electric Field
In physics, the space surrounding an electric charge or in the presence of a time-varying magnetic field has a property called an electric field (can also be equated to "Electric Flux Density"). This electric field exerts a force on other electrically charged objects. The concept of electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday.
The electric field is a vector field with SI units of newtons per coulomb (N C−1) or, equivalently, volts per meter (V m−1). The direction of the field at a point is defined by the direction of the electric force exerted on a positive test charge placed at that point. The strength of the field is defined by the ratio of the electric force on a charge at a point to the magnitude of the charge placed at that point. Electric fields contain electrical energy with energy density proportional to the square of the field intensity. The electric field is to charge as gravitational acceleration is to mass and force density is to volume.
A moving charge has not just an electric field but also a magnetic field, and in general the electric and magnetic fields are not completely separate phenomena; what one observer perceives as an electric field, another observer in a different frame of reference perceives as a mixture of electric and magnetic fields. For this reason, one speaks of "electromagnetism" or "electromagnetic fields." In quantum mechanics, disturbances in the electromagnetic fields are called photons, and the energy of photons is quantized.

Note for Electrohydrodynamics
Electrohydrodynamics (EHD), also known as electro-fluid-dynamics (EFD) or electrokinetics, is the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluid. It is the study of the motions of ionised particles or molecules and their interactions with electric fields and the surrounding fluid. The term may be considered to be synonymous with the rather elaborate electrostrictive hydrodynamics. EHD covers the following types of particle and fluid transport mechanisms:Electrophoresis, electrokinesis, dielectrophoresis, electro-osmosis, and electrorotation. In general, the phenomena relate to the direct conversion of electrical energy into kinetic energy, and vice versa.
In the first instance, shaped electrostatic fields create hydrostatic pressure (or motion) in dielectric media. When such media are fluids, a flow is produced. If the dielectric is a vacuum or a solid, no flow is produced. Such flow can be directed against the electrodes, generally to move the electrodes. In such case, the moving structure acts as an electric motor. Practical fields of interest of EHD are the common air ioniser, Electrohydrodynamic thrusters and EHD cooling systems.
In the second instance, the converse takes place. A powered flow of medium within a shaped electrostatic field adds energy to the system which is picked up as a potential difference by electrodes. In such case, the structure acts as an electrical generator.

In figure 1, Left: A conventional electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet -- a stream of electrically charged liquid forced from a nozzle -- which whips uncontrollably. Right: A stabilized jet produced by Princeton University engineers. The long-sought achievement has many possible uses in electronics and other industries.

In figure 3, Sibel Korkut, a graduate student in chemical engineering, discovered how to control electrically charged jets of liquid and print super-thin lines -- just one ten-thousandth of a millimeter wide. Here she adjusts a high-speed camera she used to analyze the jets.