Session: MESA-06 / MESA-11 / MESA-15

Paper Number: 109683

109683 - Fabrication of 3d Conformable Electronics on Arbitrary Curvilinear Surfaces Enabled by Direct Freeform Laser Technique 

Three-dimensional (3D) conformable electronic devices on freeform surfaces show superior performance to the conventional, planar ones. They have shown promising applications in various fields including epidermal electronics, bio-integrated electronics, conformable circuits/display, structural health monitoring, wearable sensors, tactile sensors, and deformable optoelectronics. Such devices represent a trend of future electronics and have been witnessed an exponential growth in various applications. Direct laser writing (DLW), a maskless, rapid fabrication technique, has been successfully demonstrated to efficiently fabricate a wide range of materials. However, the inherently 2D planar nature makes it intrinsically incompatible for fabricating 3D conformable electronics onto the complex, curvilinear surfaces. Moreover, insufficient interface between sensors and the targeted surfaces results in difficulty in collection of signals from the surrounding physical world. To tackle this challenge, we report a new direct freeform laser (DFL) fabrication method enabled by a 5-axis laser processing platform for directly fabricating 3D conformable electronics on targeted arbitrary surfaces. The proposed method can (i) omit the transfer step for fabricating adapted electronics; (ii) enable easy and accurate positioning of fabricated 3D electronics to target locations on arbitrary surfaces with complex topography; (iii) enable to process many types of materials with consistent quality on the curvilinear surfaces; (iv) create a good interface between the fabrication material and the target surface. To demonstrate its flexibility in application, representative laser induced graphene (LIG), Ag, and MoO₂ were successfully fabricated as high-performance sensing or/and electrode materials from different material precursors on various types of substrates for applications in temperature/light/gas sensing, energy storage, and printed circuit board for circuit. Last but not the least, to demonstrate an application in smart home, eight LIG based conformable strain sensors were fabricated and distributed in designated locations of an artificial tree. The distributed sensors have capability of monitoring the wind speed and direction with assistance of well-trained machine learning models. This novel process will pave a new and general route to fabricating 3D conformable electronic devices, thus creating new opportunities in robotics, biomedical sensing, structural health, environmental monitoring, and IoT applications.

Presenting Author: BUJINGDA ZHENG University of missouri

Presenting Author Biography: Bujingda Zheng received the B.S. degree in aircraft manufacturing engineering from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China, 2016, and the M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 2018. He is now pursuing the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering with the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
His research interests include smart sensor fabrication techniques, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Authors:

BUJINGDA ZHENG University of missouri