Collaborative Research: Understanding Material Transfer Mechanisms in Corona-Enabled Contactless Electrostatic Printing of Binder-free Nano-/micro-Structures

Printed electronics have a potential to transform the public health, the national security, and society as a whole. Manufacturing innovations are essential to enable cost-effective and scalable production, enhance the performance of printed electronics, and realize their broad applications. Current printing techniques, however, still face long-lasting challenges in addressing the tradeoff between the printing speed versus the print resolution and performance.

This award supports fundamental research to advance a novel corona-enabled contactless electrostatic printing (CEP) technique that utilizes the ultra-fast electrostatic attraction phenomenon to achieve the material transfer and manufacturing of binder-free nano-/micro-structures at a large scale. The contactless force control and binder-free nature lead to reduced manufacturing times and temperatures, with broader material options, and an ability to manipulate and assemble nano-/micro-structures, and improved device performance.

The roll-to-roll compatibility of the CEP process may also facilitate a pathway for transition from fundamental research to commercial marketplaces, potentially beneficial to large-area and high-performance electronics and versatile applications of flexible functional systems. Through a close collaboration between an R1 university and a minority-serving institution, with additionally an industrial partner, this project also provides hands-on research opportunities and industrial experiences to minority undergraduate students and hosts “Future Electronics” community engagement workshops to local high schools, intended to inspire more students and engineers to participate in, benefit from, and contribute to the blooming U.S. electronics industry.

To advance the CEP process, the project will focus on three basic research thrusts by a combination of numerical and experimental approaches. First, through mapping the distribution of charges and computing the distribution of the electric field, the formation and dynamic evolution mechanisms of the electric field will be revealed, which is essential to achieve precision controls.

Then, the material transfer mechanism during the CEP process will be studied by investigating the impacts of the material conductivity, geometry and density. The project will also explore methodologies to manufacture aligned nano-/micro-structures by combining an electric field with a mechanical field. Further, the responsive mechanisms of the printed structures to external stimuli will be studied by monitoring the microstructure evolution and electrical performance simultaneously, together with the effects on the performance of the binder-free CEP electronics.

Overall, the fundamental understanding of the CEP process is expected to substantially enhance the capability to precisely control an electric field to realize ultra-fast material manipulations, nano-/micro-structure constructions, and high-end electronics manufacturing.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.