High-Resolution Electrohydrodynamic Printing of Silver Reactive Inks

Nano-inkjet printing using an Electrohydrodynamic's (EHD) pulsed cone-jet approach has the potential to bring affordable additive manufacturing to the micro and nanoscale. Ink technology is a major limitation of current EHD techniques. Specifically, most EHD printing processes print either nanoparticles or polymers. The materials are structurally weak and often have poor electrical or mechanical properties. For example, printing nanoparticles effectively creates a cluster of nanoparticles that must be sintered to create a continuous material. To address these issues, we have been adapting reactive inks to work with an EHD pulsed cone-jet. Specifically, we demonstrate that silver micron-scale structures can be printed using an EHD pulsed cone-jet regime. These inks produce solid structures without sintering steps and with good electrical properties.^1,2 This work shows that reactive ink chemistries can be combined with EHD printing to produce fine-resolution features consisting of solid metal without an annealing step.