Plasma Jet Printing of Conformal Electronics for Electronic Warfare

High performance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become the leading and critical component of the modern war-fighting fleet. Enabling electromagnetic sophistication to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and providing a fastest method to address the constantly evolving electronic warfare environment can be game changing. Embedding electronics directly on to the body panel, wing panel and nose cone of large air borne RF structures is not easily doable using conventional manufacturing technologies that deals with planar surfaces. Plasma jet printing is a gravity independent direct write printing technology that delivers fluid using electromagnetic field and plasma. In addition, it provides an ability to tune the electronic structure of the materials in-situ, reducing any need for post processing and curing. Reducing a metallic ion like Cu2+ or Ag3+ to zero valent conducting metal without a separate curing step is possible using plasma jet. In addition, the gravity independence of the plasma jet allows printing in any direction providing an industrially feasible conformal printing for printing on inner mold layer (IML) and outer mold layer (OML) of large airborne RF structures including wing panel and nose cone. In-situ reduction of metal ions and examples of antenna and frequency selective surface (FSS) printing will be discussed in the presentation.