Advancing manufacturing readiness of aerosol jet printing for conformal electronics

Aerosol jet printing (AJP) offers significant potential for conformal electronics fabrication, but
realizing this potential in a manufacturing environment remains a challenge. This presentation
will focus on efforts to reduce two key barriers to this vision: manufacturing reliability and
complex motion planning. To support process consistency, an AJP closed loop control system
has been developed that automatically adjusts process parameters to maintain stable print
output. This was validated on commercial printing equipment for >8 hour print runs, effectively
mitigating drift and limiting process variability. This improves manufacturing readiness of AJP as
a general technology, streamlining process development and quality monitoring for both planar
and conformal printing. Complex toolpath planning presents a second challenge to conformal
deposition, undermining the rapid prototyping capability of this digital printing method. This
presentation will discuss a recently developed computational framework to efficiently wrap
complex planar toolpaths onto curved 3D geometries, expediting the design-to-manufacture
workflow for conformal electronics for aerosol jet or other direct write deposition modalities.
Together, these capabilities highlight opportunities to better leverage the digital nature of direct
write printing methods to advance reliability and agility for conformal electronics fabrication.