Development of Gold Inks for Inkjet Printing of Gas Sensors Electrodes on Plastic Support
Abstract
Among the conventional inks used for inkjet printing, metals, oxides, or polymers have
been deposited in order to form functional coatings. Gold is one of the most used metals for electrode
fabrication in the gas sensor field due to its inert behavior when exposed to reactive gases and
conductive properties. However, only a few commercial gold inks are commercially available, and
the combination of excessive price, a high minimum purchase quantity, and an unknown composition
renders the actual products unappealing. To meet these shortcomings, gold inks were formulated
with different solvents in order to reach sufficient properties for the inkjet printing process, such as
surface tension and viscosity. On the one hand, gold ink was developed using a gold nanoparticle
(AuNP) solution as the metal. This ink was optimized from nanoparticle synthesis, with the ink
formulation obtaining a 32 mN·m−1 surface tension and 11.2 mPa·s viscosity in order to be inkjetprinted onto polyimide foil. On the other hand, a particle-free ink, called a precursor based of ink,
was also developed. In this case, ink was made by solubilizing gold salt in aqueous medium in
order to reach jettable properties. Surface tension was measured at 32 mN·m−1 while viscosity was 14.0 mPa·s. Then, printing and deposition parameters were optimized in order to obtain a highly
conductive gold coating. The measured resistivity was 2 × 10−7 Ω·m which is close to the bulk gold conductive value. These coatings could be used for the fabrication of various devices in different
working fields.
Origin | Publication funded by an institution |
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