A lire sur: http://www.atelier.net/en/trends/articles/paper-electronic-components-coming-soon_420932
Lowering the cost of manufacturing
electronic components is a priority for many industries. It appears that
flexible and plentiful paper could well provide an economic solution.
Is paper set to become a key new material for
manufacturing electronic chips? Work carried out by Stefan Glatzel and a
team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, has shown how paper can be transformed into an electrically conductive material.
This solution seems likely to solve a deficiency in the current process
of electronic component production. At the moment, plastics are the
material mainly used as the carrier in flexible chips, but these
substances do not tolerate the very high temperatures required to build
an electronic circuit, which means that processing cannot be integrated
into normal electronics manufacture but must be performed separately.
The solution that the German scientists have come up with transforms
paper into an electronic component by using heat.
‘Paper electronics’
The method is relatively simple. First, an inkjet printer
prints a catalyst in a certain pattern on a sheet of paper. The Max
Planck Institute explains that if the researchers then heat the sheet
that was printed with a catalyst to 800° Celsius in a nitrogen
atmosphere, the cellulose will continue to release water until all that
remains is pure carbon. So “an electrically conducting mixture of
regularly structured carbon sheets of pure-carbon graphite and iron
carbide forms in the printed areas, while the non-printed areas are left
behind as carbon without a regular structure, and they are less
conductive.” The Max Planck researchers took their Minerva symbol as the
printed pattern, which – now composed of conductive graphite – was then
used as the cathode in a process of electrolysis to produce a
copper-coated Minerva. This demonstrated that a simple pattern on a
piece of paper had been successfully converted into
electricity-conducting material.
3D components too
In another experiment, the team in Potsdam demonstrated how
three-dimensional, conductive structures can be created using the same
method, this time by dipping the 3D object into the catalyst. There are
many potential applications for this research, including RFID chips,
‘connected’ clothing that can monitor vital signs, and flexible screens.
This discovery could also make for huge savings in the electronic
components industry, as it uses a readily available, relatively cheap,
resource.
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