Previous efforts to combine these two areas had bumped into the limitations of conventional inkjet printing technology.
- Vincenzo Pecunia
The printing-based approach, jointly developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, combines high-resolution inkjet printing with nanophotonics – the study and harnessing of light on the scale of a billionth of a metre – the first time that this combination has been successfully demonstrated. The results are reported in the journal Advanced Materials.
Over the last decade, inkjet printing – the same basic technology that many of us have in our homes – has advanced to the point where it can be used to print very small devices, using a range of printable materials, including living cells, as ‘ink’. This approach is both simple and low-cost, and it is widely used in electronics and biotechnology.
“Most inkjet printers push the ink through the nozzle by heating or applying pressure, producing ink droplets about the size of the diameter of a human hair,” said the paper’s co-first author Dr Vincenzo Pecunia, a former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, and now visiting researcher, at the University’s Cavendish Laboratory.
Pecunia’s research focuses on printable optoelectronic materials for a range of applications, and his group recently obtained a printer based on electrohydrodynamic jets: a long word that essentially means a printer capable of ultra-high resolution printing. Instead of relying on pressure or heat, this type of printer applies a voltage to the ink, providing enough force to push it through a much smaller nozzle, producing ultra-small ink droplets – ten to a hundred times smaller than those produced by conventional printers.
Thanks to a chance meeting between Pecunia and co-first author Dr Frederic Brossard from the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, the researchers found that the new printer could print structures small enough to be used in nanophotonics, which is Brossard’s area of research.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge