Dry Multimaterial Printer: An Ink-less Technology with On-Demand Generation and Real-time Sintering of Pure Nanoparticles

The world is rapidly moving toward the internet of things (IoT), where everything around us will be made smart, and so does the need for low-cost, eco-friendly, and fast design-to-manufacturing technologies to integrate various electronics and devices onto these objects. This has led to a high interest in additively manufactured electronics (AME) or so-called printed electronics, as it can potentially enable IoT with a wide range of applications in electronics, healthcare, automotive, aerospace, defense, and energy industries. However, the current printing technologies are based on wet printing methods such as inkjet and aerosol jet printers that suffer from complex and expensive ink formulation, limited printing material options, contaminations, and time-consuming post-processing.

This talk will present the world’s first “dry multimaterial printer” that transforms the printing of functional materials and devices for electronics, energy, healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and defense applications. This disruptive technology revolutionizes printing from a traditional liquid-based to dry printing technology. The Key technology advantages include 1) on-demand and in-situ generation of various pure nanoparticles without contaminations, 2) in-situ and real-time laser sintering of nanoparticles on various substrates with no further post-processing, 3) multimaterial printing of hybrid and composite materials and structures. The liquid-free nature of the system, the tunable flow dynamic of the nanoparticles, and the real-time sintering mechanism make it uniquely suitable for operating both on the earth and in space. Moreover, this technology is capable of printing sensitive materials such as copper on biodegradable substrates such as paper.