Work Experience
Large scale printed electronics
In parallel to this has been the development of direct print electronics ie no etching. A wide variety of specialist conductive inks are commercially available that were developed for use in solar panels, smart packaging, wearables and e-textiles. They can be printed on to films, rubbers, fabrics and many other substrates which really opens up the range of possible applications.
Since these ink are viscous and can require thick laydown the print methods used are typically screen printing, flexographic printing, lithographic plate etc. Inkjet inks exist but the range is less and price is higher.
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These methods have significant setup up cost and the print envelope is limited, so large scale one-off prototypes are expensive or impossible.
The requirement for this project was to produce a very large scale printer that could dispense high viscosity conductive ink onto a wide variety of flexible and place surface mount components
Print results