Low-temperature sintering of printed conductive structures from noble metal nano inks (SILENT)

The project SILENT aims at the development of a process for the fabrication of conductive silver and gold structures on cost-efficient temperature-sensitive thermoplastics by means of digital printing technologies.

The project SILENT aims at the development of a process for the fabrication of conductive silver and gold structures on cost-efficient temperature-sensitive thermoplastics by means of digital printing technologies. The utilization of digital printing technologies such as Inkjet or Aerosol Jet offers therefore a cost-efficient alternative to established manufacturing processes. In order to obtain high conductivity of the printed structures commercially available inks must be cured at relatively high temperature.  Therefore, these printing technologies cannot be applied with widely-used temperature-sensitive polymers such as PMMA, PC or PS. Moreover there is an urgent need for low-temperature curable gold inks for biomedical applications.