Implementation of New Materials and Printed Electronics for Monitoring the Environment

Brewer Science's vision is to design, build, and deploy connected gas and water sensors that monitor environmental contaminants quantitatively on a large scale. For the last 10 years, Brewer Science has developed the materials and technology to print cost-effective sensors that can measure contaminants in water, such as heavy metals (lead, cadmium), copper, calcium, magnesium, nitrate, pH, and ORP, as well as sensors that assess air quality by measuring gases like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, VOCs, and oxygen. Brewer Science fabricates a variety of printable sensor materials and deposits them onto a substrate utilizing processes such as physical vapor deposition (PVD) sputtering, screen printing, stencil printing, ink-jet printing, spray coating, and high-speed jet dispensing. Producing low-cost sensors with low-power electronics and wireless communication will enable the deployment of sensors over vast areas for real-time monitoring of environmental conditions.

To enable this vision of building and distributing cost-effective environmental sensors, the electronics industry must accelerate the advancement of additively manufactured electronics (AME). Some of the biggest challenges in implementing AME technologies is the development of printable functional inks, especially electrically non-conductive materials. There have been decades of progress in conductive inks, driven by applications such as membrane switches, resistive heaters, RFID tags, photovoltaics, and RF antennas. The next wave of development will be in the creation of new printable materials such as low-loss dielectrics, porous membranes, ion selective membranes, optical materials, and environmental protection layers (encapsulants). Brewer Science is excited to be part of this future by leaning on its core strength as an innovative materials development and manufacturing company.