Abstract Additive and solvent-free direct printing is critical for many applications including smart electronics, solar cells, healthcare, and electrochemical energy storage. Although a few green techniques for direct patterning of inorganic functional materials have been developed, their scale is small and the require a long processing times, restricting their effective translation from laboratory to market. Here we report a fast, liquid-free, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly aerosol-based printing method for fabricating linear or planar structures at microscale dimensions. In situ and on-demand generation of dry aerosol via pulse laser ablation, coupled with real-time aerodynamical focusing using a co-flowing sheath gas, allows the deposition of a wide variety of materials on various substrates at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Using silver as a test material, we systematically characterized the laser-generated aerosol deposits in terms of microstructural morphology, sintering activity, mass yield, density, and electrical performance, to show the relationship between process variability and underlying mechanisms. The capacity of high-throughput printing of silver deposits, with thickness up to 160 µm, in a single pass was demonstrated. This rapid, efficient, and inkless printing process opens new and exciting opportunities for future applications which require easy-to-integrate components in printed electronic devices.
Su et al. (Wed,) studied this question.