Combining 3D printing and printable
electronics
John Sarik
James Scott
Abstract
Columbia University
Microsoft Research
500 W 120th St. Room 1300
7 JJ Thomson Avenue
New York, NY 10027 USA
Cambridge, CB3 0FB, UK
[email protected]
[email protected]
Alex Butler
Steve Hodges
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research
7 JJ Thomson Avenue
7 JJ Thomson Avenue
A platform that enables the integration of conductive
traces and printed three dimensional mechanical
structures has been developed. We discuss the
development of the platform and address issues that
arise when combining 3D printing and printable
electronics. We demonstrate a rapid prototyped three
dimensional conductive trace and propose future
applications for the platform.
Cambridge, CB3 0FB, UK
Cambridge, CB3 0FB, UK
[email protected]
[email protected]
Nicolas Villar
Microsoft Research
7 JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge, CB3 0FB, UK
[email protected]
Keywords
3d printing, printed electronics, rapid prototyping
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2 Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): User Interfaces - Prototyping.
Copyright is held by the author / owner(s).
TEI 2012, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, February 19 22, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4503-1174-8/12/0002 $10.00
Introduction
Fabrication Platform
The goal of this project is to explore the combination of
two emerging technologies: 3D printing and printable
electronics. Desktop 3D printers that allow users to
print a wide range of mechanical structures are
becoming more affordable and accessible. At the same
time researchers have demonstrated printable
electronic devices, such as transistors, solar cells, and
light emitting diodes. Advances in materials and
fabrication techniques will continue to increase the
performance and affordability of both technologies.
These two technologies have been largely independent,
but combining them would enable exciting new
possibilities that extend the personal factory concept
to functional objects.
We propose a new approach that uses a spray
deposition system based on a commercial airbrush and
room temperature air drying conductive inks. Spray
deposition allows for easy conformal deposition of
materials on non-planar, non-uniform surfaces [5]. The
platform consists of an off the shelf 3DTouch triple
head 3D printer (BitsfromBytes) and a single action
gravity feed airbrush (Iwata). The airbrush is mounted
vertically parallel to the extruder heads and is triggered
by a servo motor that depresses the trigger. The
electronics for the third extruder have been removed
and additional hardware has been added to turn on the
airbrush when a command to turn on extruder 3 is
issued. This modification allowed us to repurpose the
system without modifying the firmware. The important
process parameters for deposition are air pressure,
spray time, and the distance between the nozzle and
the surface. Proper adjustment of these parameters is
essential to ensure uniform coverage in the XY plane
and good sidewall coverage in the XZ and YZ planes.
Related Work
One of the most accessible and wide spread 3D printing
technologies is fused deposition modeling (FDM), which
builds objects layer by layer by extruding thermoplastic
materials. One approach to printing conductive traces,
arguably the most fundamental building block of all
electronics, with these systems is to replace the nonconductive thermoplastic with an extrudable conductive
material. There are currently no commercially available
materials with the necessary properties, but
researchers have demonstrated thermoplastics doped
with conductive material that are attractive candidates
[1]. A more common approach has been to add
additional hardware. Some examples include a heated
syringe that dispenses a dispense a low melting point
solder [2], a device that lays down solid core wire [3],
and a pneumatic syringe that dispenses conductive
slurries and paste [4]. The major limitation of all these
approaches is they are generally limited to printing only
in the XY plane.
figure 1. extruder heads and airbrush
Conductive Materials
Masking Materials
The ideal conductive material would be low cost,
nontoxic, and widely available, and its viscosity and
curing conditions should be compatible with the
deposition system used. The conductive film produced
should also have high conductivity, high uniformity, and
good surface adhesion. After a thorough search, two
candidate materials, CuPro-Cote copper paint and
Electrodag 915 silver paint, were selected. The copper
paint is water-based, lower cost, lower conductivity and
designed for large area applications, such as EMF
shielding. The silver ink is solvent based, higher
conductivity, and designed for small area applications,
such as scanning electron microscope sample
preparation. Important properties of the materials are
shown in table 3. Preliminary test showed good
uniformity and agreement with stated resistivity.
The three most common materials used in FDM
systems are acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS),
polylactic acid (PLA), and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). PVA
is soluble in water and sodium hydroxide (KOH)
solution, PLA is soluble in KOH solution but insoluble
water, and ABS is insoluble in both water and KOH
solution. PLA and PVA are commonly used as support
material for ABS structures, but they can also be used
as a sacrificial mask material to pattern the conductive
traces. The conductive traces, when dried, are not
affected by immersion in water or KOH solution. If the
minimum trace width achievable by airbrush deposition
is not sufficient, then a sacrificial PLA or PVA mask can
be printed before deposition. In this case the minimum
trace width is constrained by the minimum feature size
of the extruded PLA or PVA mask.
The conductivity of the deposited trace, the ultimate
performance metric, depends on the material, the
deposition system, deposition process parameters, and
the substrate. Previous research has extensively
characterized materials, deposition techniques, and
conventional substrates for printed electronics, but
extruded thermoplastic substrates have not been
characterized. Due to the nature of the printing process
the surface will be have periodic non-uniformities.
Horizontal, vertical, and angled surfaces will have
different characteristics that depend strongly on the
extrusion process.
Proof of Concept Structures
Material
CuPro-Cote (Cu)
Electrodag 915 (Ag)
Conductivity
(/Sq@25um)
1
0.015
table 2. Conductive ink properties
Price
($/mL)
0.10
15
To prove the masking concept we built a structure that
consists of a series of simple two-dimensional
conductive traces on an ABS substrate. The traces were
patterned with a PLA masking layer. The design for this
test structure is shown in figure 2. After the structure
was printed the conductive material was deposited and
allowed to dry. Finally the structure was placed in a
KOH bath to remove the PLA. Using this method, the
minimum width of dense traces produced by the
platform was decreased from 2.5mm to 1mm.
Coverage
(cm^2/mL)
137
187
figure 2. masking test structure (ABS: blue, PLA: red)
Another test structure demonstrates the possibility of
truly three dimensional traces. The structure is printed
in ABS without a mask. The contact pads are 4mm x
4mm and separated by a horizontal distance of 10mm
and a vertical distance of 4mm. The conductive
material was deposited after the structure was printed.
Sidewall coverage was achieved by starting deposition
on the bottom contact pad and moving the airbrush
along the trace toward the top contact pad. In this case
the trace is short enough that the sidewall can be
completely covered after printing. Taller traces could be
achieved by depositing the conductive material during
the print. The finished test structure is shown in figure
3. The resistance between the pads varies between
25 and 100 depending on the area of the pads
contacted. This resistance can be reduced by modifying
the printing process of the ABS structure to decrease
the surface roughness of the trace.
These two relatively simple test structures, while
unimpressive in themselves, prove that it will be
possible to print complex structures with embedded
three dimensional conductive traces.
figure 3. a printed 3D dimensional trace
Advanced Prototypes
To explore the capabilities of the system we designed
structures that could be eventually printed using this
platform. The first prototype is a single sided printed
circuit board (PCB). We generated a .DXF file from a
printed circuit board layout (EAGLE) and used this file
to construct a 3D model in a constructive solid
geometry modeler (OpenSCAD). This model, which
includes a masking layer, can then be exported as an
STL file and 3D printed. An example PCB with the
conductive material deposited and mask removed is
shown in figure 4.
This technique allows for the simple fabrication of single
sided surface mount or through hole PCBs. Components
can be attached using conductive epoxy or low
temperature solder. Compared to other PCB
manufacturing processes, such as milling copper clad
sheets, this is a completely additive process. This
process could also be expanded to include multilayer
PCBs and three dimensional printed circuit boards with
arbitrary shapes.
figure 4. printable PCB concept (ABS: yellow, Ag: silver)
Software Toolchain
The process required to go from 3D model to 3D
printed object can be quite involved. Typically a model
is designed in a 3D CAD program and exported as an
.STL file. Bitsfrombytes provides a program called Axon
which processes these .STL files and generate a series
of commands, called G-codes, to send to the printer.
When the G-code is sent to the printer a microcontroller
parses the commands and controls the hardware to
perform the actions specified by the G-code. Adding
additional hardware requires repurposing existing Gcodes or implementing additional G-codes by modifying
the firmware. Our hardware allows us to treat the
airbrush deposition system as a normal extruder loaded
with conductive material in the software.
This is a rather complex toolchain and errors can be
introduced along the way, even for simple mechanical
structures. Current 3D file formats, such as STL, only
contain information about geometric structures.
Integrating information about functional electronic
components is difficult. Printed circuit boards are
defined by a schematic netlist, a list of all the
components and the connections between them, and a
board layout, the physical location of the components
and the traces that connect them. As the platform
evolves there will be a need for an integrated file
format, similar to the proposed RepRap File Format [6].
Conclusions and Future Work
We have demonstrated the ability to combine 3D
printed mechanical structures and three dimensional
conductive traces. This is the first step toward
combining 3D printing and printable electronics, which
would fundamentally change the process of rapid
prototyping embedded systems. We are currently
working to improve the functionality of the hardware,
by adding and tilt to the airbrush, testing new
materials, such as transparent conductors and
electroluminescent materials, and developing new
software to design structures that combine electrical
and mechanical elements. We welcome feedback from
the community on how we can extend this technology
and establish useful standards for further development.
References
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