Washington, June 29 (ANI): A rollerball pen with conductive silver ink that can write electric circuits and interconnects directly on paper, wood and other surfaces have been developed by University of Illinois engineers.
The pen is writing whole new chapters in low-cost, flexible and disposable electronics.
"Pen-based printing allows one to construct electronic devices 'on-the-fly,' " said Jennifer Lewis, the Hans Thurnauer professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois.
"This is an important step toward enabling desktop manufacturing (or personal fabrication) using very low cost, ubiquitous printing tools," he added.
While it looks like a typical silver-colour rollerball pen, the pen's ink is a solution of real silver. After writing, the liquid in the ink dries to leave conductive silver pathways - in essence, paper-mounted wires. The ink maintains its conductivity through multiple bends and folds of the paper, enabling devices with great flexibility and conformability.
Metallic inks have been used in approaches using inkjet printers to fabricate electronic devices, but the pen offers freedom and flexibility to apply ink directly to paper or other rough surfaces instantly, at low cost and without programming.
"The key advantage of the pen is that the costly printers and printheads typically required for inkjet or other printing approaches are replaced with an inexpensive, hand-held writing tool," said Lewis, who is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
The finding has been published in the journal Advanced Materials. (ANI)
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