Directing ink through a cylindrical nozzle onto a substrate is a promising method for printing metallic electrodes for electronic devices. Until now, however, the technique has had several restrictions: nozzle clogging, relatively large features (~100 um) and deposition that is constrained to the x–y plane. Jennifer A. Lewis and co-workers have created highly concentrated silver nanoparticle inks that can be printed in three dimensions in air without clogging. more...
A new ink developed by researchers at the University of Illinois allows them to write their own silver linings.
The ink, composed of silver nanoparticles, can be used in electronic and optoelectronic applications to create flexible, stretchable and spanning microelectrodes that carry signals from one circuit element to another. The printed microelectrodes can withstand repeated bending and stretching with minimal change in their electrical properties. more...
Read the original Science article here.
Flexible printed electronics and solar-cell arrays promise to be cheaper and more versatile than their rigid counterparts. But their components still need to be linked by tiny metal electrodes in order to get electrons flowing through a device. A new silver-nanoparticle ink could be just the thing for printing high-performance electrical connections for flexible devices. More...
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With high oil prices sparking a surge of interest in alternative energy sources, solar cells have become the subject of intense research. Much of this effort focuses on finding new designs that open up fresh applications. John Rogers and colleagues now report just such a development (J. Yoon et al. Nature Mater. doi:10.1038/nmat2287; 2008) - tiny, ultrathin cells made of silicon that, when fixed in arrays on a flexible substrate, create large, bendy solar cells (pictured). More...
Photovoltaic cells, the basic building blocks of solar panels, are more efficient and less costly than ever. But manipulating cells (which are usually made of semiconductor materials) and incorporating them into different panel designs is not necessarily easy. More...
Cut your finger, and your body starts mending the wound even before you have had time to go and find a Band-Aid. Synthetic materials are not so forgiving, but Nancy R. Sottos, Scott R. White and their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are looking to change all that. They developed a self-healing plastic that contains a three dimensional network of microscopic capillaries filled with a liquid healing agent. More...
In a display of nature's restorative powers, human skin has the ability to heal itself when cut. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois have invented materials that do the same thing. More...
New sol-gel inks developed by researchers at the University of Illinois can be printed into patterns to producage three-dimensional structures of metal oxides with nanoscale features. More...
The latest photonic device built by researchers at the University of Illinois, a so-called inverse woodpile structure, is made of germanium which has a higher refractive index than silicon. "Until now, all woodpile structures have been composed of solid or hollow rods in an air matrix," said Paul Braun, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. Their new germanium matrix containing a periodic array of tubular holes has one of the widest photonic band gaps ever reported (as large as 25%). "In many applications, from low-threshold lasers to highly efficient solar cells, photonic crystals with wide band gaps may be required". More...
ScienCentral News and WBKO - Even high tech machines like the space shuttle need the occasional repair. But what if materials like plastics could repair themselves? As this ScienCentral News video reports, scientists are doing just that by imitating how our bodies work to heal small wounds. More...
(BusinessWeek) - Plants and animals can repair themselves thanks to circulatory systems that carry healing agents to wounded tissue. Researchers at the Univ. of Illinois have created a new plastic that fixes itself the same way. The material is embedded with channels about as wide as a human hair. More...
Germanium inverse woodpile 3D photonic crystals with a large (25%) photonic band gap in the infrared (background image) were fabricated through a multistep replication procedure. A polymer scaffold was first created by direct-write assembly, followed by the conformal growth of oxide and semiconductor layers, and removal of the polymer and oxide (foreground), as reported on p. 1567 by Paul Braun, Jennifer Lewis, and co-workers.
Also see solid state and materials research news in Physica Status Solidi (RRL)
The principal activities of the Lewis Group involve colloidal assembly of materials, understanding the phase behavior and rheological properties of complex fluids, and direct ink writing of planar and 3D structures.
