Cleeman, Jeremy: Hybrid Additive Manufacturing of Embedded Electronics

Title: Hybrid Additive Manufacturing of Embedded Electronics

Name: Jeremy Cleeman

Major: Mechanical Engineering

School affiliation: School of Engineering

Programs: Aresty – Research or Conference Funding Recipient

Other contributors: Rajiv Malhotra

Abstract: Combining metal nanoparticle printing with polymer additive manufacturing has the potential to enable the manufacturing of devices with embedded electronic elements. State-of-the-art manufacturing processes offer a trade off between circuit resistivity or polymer damage. The goal of this work is to significantly decrease interconnect resistivity without damaging the substrate. In order to accomplish this goal we explore the mechanisms of Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), printing of silver NPs and out-of-chamber Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) sintering of the printed circuits. While attempting to achieve appropriate levels of circuit resistance, IPL of only-nanosphere based circuits lead to thermal damage of the polymer. However, a combination of both Ag nanospheres and nanowires achieves a resistivity several times lower than state-of-the-art (13.1 μΩ-cm or 8 x bulk silver) without any polymer damage. This circuit was sintered within 0.75 s of IPL