Sven Forsberg

Inkjet Printed Silver Nanoparticle Humidity Sensor With Memory Effect on Paper

In this paper, the design and the manufacture of an inkjet printed resistive type humidity sensor on paper are reported. After having been exposed to humidity above a given threshold level, the resistance of the sensor decreases substantially and remains at that level even when the humidity is reduced. It is possible to deduce the humidity level by monitoring the resistance. The main benefit of the printed sensor presented in this case is in relation to its very low production costs. It has also been shown that both the ink type and this paper combination used prove to be crucial in order to obtain the desired sensor effect. More research is required in order to fully understand the humidity sintering effect on the nano particle ink and the role of the substrate. However, the observed effect can be put to use in printed humidity sensors which possess a memory function. The sensor can be used in various applications for environmental monitoring, for example, in situations where a large number of inexpensive and disposable humidity sensors are required which are able to detect whether they have been subjected to high humidity. This could be the checking of transportation conditions of goods or monitoring humidity within buildings.

Thermally reduced kaolin-graphene oxide nanocomposites for gas sensing

Highly sensitive graphene-based gas sensors can be made using large-area single layer graphene, but the cost of large-area pure graphene is high, making the simpler reduced graphene oxide (rGO) an attractive alternative. To use rGO for gas sensing, however, require a high active surface area and slightly different approach is needed. Here, we report on a simple method to produce kaolin-graphene oxide (GO) nanocomposites and an application of this nanocomposite as a gas sensor. The nanocomposite was made by binding the GO flakes to kaolin with the help of 3-Aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES). The GO flakes in the nanocomposite were contacting neighboring GO flakes as observed by electron microscopy. After thermal annealing, the nanocomposite become conductive as showed by sheet resistance measurements. Based on the conductance changes of the nanocomposite films, electrical gas sensing devices were made for detecting NH3 and HNO3. These devices had a higher sensitivity than thermally annealed multilayer GO films. This kaolin-GO nanocomposite might be useful in applications that require a low-cost material with large conductive surface area including the demonstrated gas sensors.

Metal-free supercapacitor with aqueous electrolyte and low-cost carbon materials

Electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) or supercapacitors (SCs) are fast energy storage devices with high pulse efficiency and superior cyclability, which makes them useful in various applications including electronics, vehicles and grids. Aqueous SCs are considered to be more environmentally friendly than those based on organic electrolytes. Because of the corrosive nature of the aqueous environment, however, expensive electrochemically stable materials are needed for the current collectors and electrodes in aqueous SCs. This results in high costs for a given energy-storage capacity. To address this, we developed a novel low-cost aqueous SC using graphite foil as the current collector and a mix of graphene, nanographite, simple water-purification carbons and nanocellulose as electrodes. The electrodes were coated directly onto the graphite foil by using casting frames and the SCs were assembled in a pouch cell design. With this approach, we achieved a material cost reduction of greater than 90% while maintaining approximately one-half of the specific capacitance of a commercial unit, thus demonstrating that the proposed SC can be an environmentally friendly, low-cost alternative to conventional SCs.

Assisted sintering of silver nanoparticle inkjet ink on paper with active coatings

Inkjet-printed metal films are important within the emerging field of printed electronics. For large-scale manufacturing, low-cost flexible substrates and low temperature sintering is desired. Tail ...

Large-Scale Production of Nanographite by Tube-Shear Exfoliation in Water

The number of applications based on graphene, few-layer graphene, and nanographite is rapidly increasing. A large-scale process for production of these materials is critically needed to achieve cost-effective commercial products. Here, we present a novel process to mechanically exfoliate industrial quantities of nanographite from graphite in an aqueous environment with low energy consumption and at controlled shear conditions. This process, based on hydrodynamic tube shearing, produced nanometer-thick and micrometer-wide flakes of nanographite with a production rate exceeding 500 gh-1 with an energy consumption about 10 Whg-1. In addition, to facilitate large-area coating, we show that the nanographite can be mixed with nanofibrillated cellulose in the process to form highly conductive, robust and environmentally friendly composites. This composite has a sheet resistance below 1.75 Ω/sq and an electrical resistivity of 1.39×10-4 Ωm and may find use in several applications, from supercapacitors and batteries to printed electronics and solar cells. A batch of 100 liter was processed in less than 4 hours. The design of the process allow scaling to even larger volumes and the low energy consumption indicates a low-cost process.

The influence of paper coating content on room temperature sintering of silver nanoparticle ink.

The resistance of inkjet printed lines using a silver nanoparticle based ink can be very dependent on the substrate. A very large difference in resistivity was observed for tracks printed on paper substrates with aluminum oxide based coatings compared to silica based coatings. Silica based coatings are often cationized with polymers using chloride as a counter ion. It is suggested that the precipitation of silver salts is the cause of the high resistivity, since papers pretreated with salt solutions containing ions that precipitate silver salts gave a high resistance. Silver nitrate has a high solubility and paper pretreated with nitrate ions gave a low resistivity without sintering. The results obtained show that, by choosing the correct type of paper substrate, it is possible to manufacture printed structures, such as interconnects on paper, without the need for, or at least to reduce the need for, post-print sintering. This phenomenon is, of course, ink specific. Inks without or with a low silver ion content are not expected to behave in this manner. In some sensor applications, a high resistivity is desired and, by using the correct combination of ink and paper, these types of sensors can be facilitated.

Investigation of Humidity Sensor Effect in Silver Nanoparticle Ink Sensors Printed on Paper

Thin inkjet-printed tracks of silver nanoparticles have previously been observed to show a non-reversible decrease in resistance when exposed to a high degree of relative humidity and thus providing sensor functionality with a memory effect. This paper provides a more in-depth explanation of the observed humidity sensor effect that originates from inkjet-printed silver nanoparticle sensors on a paper substrate. It is shown that the geometry of the sensor has a large effect on the sensors initial resistance, and therefore also on the sensors resistive dynamic range. The importance of the sensor geometry is believed to be due to the amount of solvent from the ink interacting with the coating of the paper substrate, which in turn enables the diffusion of salts from the paper coating into the ink and thus affecting the silver ink.

Evaluation of Coatings Applied to Flexible Substrates to Enhance Quality of Ink Jet Printed Silver Nano-Particle Structures

Different types of the commercial surface treatment InkAid have been evaluated as a surface treatment to enhance print quality of silver nano-particle ink structures printed on polyimide and polyethene substrates. Originally these coatings were designed to be applied on substrates for graphical ink jet printing. On the coated polyimide and polyethene substrates lines of different widths have been printed using a Dimatix materials printer together with silver nano-particle ink manufactured by Advanced Nano-Products. The prints have then been evaluated in terms of print quality and resistivity before and after sintering. The results show that the application of these coatings can improve the print quality considerably, making it possible to print lines with a good definition, which is not otherwise possible with this type of ink on this substrate types. It has been found that the semi-gloss coating provides the best results, both in terms of print quality as well as the lowest resistivity. The resistivity on polyethene is 3.5×10-7 Ωm at best when sintered at 150°C and for polyimide 8.9×10-8 Ωm sintered at 200°C. This corresponds to a conductivity of about 4.5% and 18% of bulk silver, respectively. It can be concluded that applying such polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)-based coatings to polyethene and polyimide will increase the print quality quite substantially, making it possible to print patterns with requirements of smaller line widths and more details than what is possible without coating.

Soap-film coating: High-speed deposition of multilayer nanofilms

The coating of thin films is applied in numerous fields and many methods are employed for the deposition of these films. Some coating techniques may deposit films at high speed; for example, ordinary printing paper is coated with micrometre-thick layers of clay at a speed of tens of meters per second. However, to coat nanometre thin films at high speed, vacuum techniques are typically required, which increases the complexity of the process. Here, we report a simple wet chemical method for the high-speed coating of films with thicknesses at the nanometre level. This soap-film coating technique is based on forcing a substrate through a soap film that contains nanomaterials. Molecules and nanomaterials can be deposited at a thickness ranging from less than a monolayer to several layers at speeds up to meters per second. We believe that the soap-film coating method is potentially important for industrial-scale nanotechnology.

Electrode Mass Balancing as an Inexpensive and Simple Method to Increase the Capacitance of Electric Double-Layer Capacitors.

Symmetric electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) have equal masses of the same active material in both electrodes. However, having equal electrode masses may prevent the EDLC to have the largest possible specific capacitance if the sizes of the hydrated anions and cations in the electrolyte differ because the electrodes and the electrolyte may not be completely utilized. Here we demonstrate how this issue can be resolved by mass balancing. If the electrode masses are adjusted according to the size of the ions, one can easily increase an EDLC’s specific capacitance. To that end, we performed galvanostatic cycling to measure the capacitances of symmetric EDLCs with different electrode mass ratios using four aqueous electrolytes— Na2SO4, H2SO4, NaOH, and KOH (all with a concentration of 1 M)—and compared these to the theoretical optimal electrode mass ratio that we calculated using the sizes of the hydrated ions. Both the theoretical and experimental values revealed lower-than-1 optimal electrode ratios for all electrolytes except KOH. The largest increase in capacitance was obtained for EDLCs with NaOH as electrolyte. Specifically, we demonstrate an increase of the specific capacitance by 8.6% by adjusting the electrode mass ratio from 1 to 0.86. Our findings demonstrate that electrode mass balancing is a simple and inexpensive method to increase the capacitance of EDLCs. Furthermore, our results imply that one can reduce the amount of unused material in EDLCs and thus decrease their weight, volume and cost.