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Sacrificial gold coating enhances transport of liquid metal in pressurized fountain pen lithography.

ABSTRACT: Liquid metals have attracted attention as functional components for moldable electronics, such as soft flexible connectors, wires or conductive ink. The relatively high surface tension (>?400 mN m^-1) and the fact that liquid metals do not readily wet ceramic or oxide surfaces have led to devising unique techniques to spread the liquid and mold its shape. These techniques include surface modification, electrowetting and vacuum filling of channels. This work presents an injection technique based on pressurized fountain pen lithography with glass nanopipettes developed to directly pattern liquid metal on flat hard substrates. The liquid metals were eutectic alloys of Gallium, including Gallium-Indium (EGaIn), Gallium-Indium-Zinc and Gallium-Indium-Tin. The nanopipettes were coated internally with gold, acting as a sacrificial layer and facilitating the wetting of the pipette down to its pore, with an inner diameter of?~?100-300 nm. By applying hydrodynamic pressure to the connected end of the pipette, the metal was extruded through the pore, forming long continuous (>?3 mm) and narrow (~?1-15 µm) metal lines on silicon oxide and gold surfaces at room temperature and ambient conditions. With this robust platform, it is possible to pattern liquid metals on a variety of substrates and geometries down to the micron range.

SUBMITTER: Livshits GI

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7907188 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sacrificial gold coating enhances transport of liquid metal in pressurized fountain pen lithography.

Livshits Gideon I GI Bao Jiannan J Sakamoto Leo L Misaka Tomoki T Usami Yuki Y Otsuka Yoichi Y Matsumoto Takuya T

Scientific reports 20210225 1

Liquid metals have attracted attention as functional components for moldable electronics, such as soft flexible connectors, wires or conductive ink. The relatively high surface tension (> 400 mN m<sup>-1</sup>) and the fact that liquid metals do not readily wet ceramic or oxide surfaces have led to devising unique techniques to spread the liquid and mold its shape. These techniques include surface modification, electrowetting and vacuum filling of channels. This work presents an injection techni ...[more]

PMID: 33633292

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Project description:Embedding liquid metals (LMs) into an elastomer is emerging as a promising strategy for stretchable conductors. Existing manufacturing techniques are struggling between spatial resolution and process complexity and are limited to chemically resistant substrates. Here, we report on a hybrid process combining stencil lithography and centrifugal force-assisted patterning of liquid metal for the development of LM-based stretchable conductors. The selective wetting behavior of oxide-removed eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn) on metal patterns defined by stencil lithography enables micrometer scale LM patterns on an elastomeric substrate. Stencil lithography allows for defining metal regions without harsh chemical treatments, making it suitable for a wide range of substrates. Microscale LM patterns are achieved by efficiently removing the excess material by the centrifugal forces experienced from spinning the substrate. The proposed approach allows for the creation of LM patterns with a line width as small as 2 μm on a stretchable poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) substrate. The electrical measurement results show that the fabricated EGaIn devices can endure 40% mechanical strain over several thousands of cycles. Furthermore, a stencil design using microbridges is proposed to address the mechanical stability issue in stencil lithography. An EGaIn conductor with a serpentine structure and an interdigitated capacitor are fabricated and characterized. The results demonstrate that the patterned serpentine conductors retain their functionality with applied mechanical strain up to 80%. The performance of the interdigitated capacitors upon applied strain is in good agreement with the theoretical estimation. Finally, we demonstrate our approach also on poly(octamethylene maleate (anhydride) citrate) (POMaC) substrates to broaden the use of the proposed method to not only flexible and stretchable but also biodegradable substrates, opening a way for in vivo transient microsystem engineering. The work presented here provides a versatile and reliable approach for manufacturing stretchable conductors.

Dataset Information

Sacrificial gold coating enhances transport of liquid metal in pressurized fountain pen lithography.

Publications

Sacrificial gold coating enhances transport of liquid metal in pressurized fountain pen lithography.

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