Thanks to the top universities and research gone into printed circuitry, soft robots and stretchy electronics are already a reality. Now a group of researchers from Purdue claim that they’ve figured out a way to mass produce these using an inkjet printer loaded with a liquid metal allow.
“This process… allows us to print flexible and stretchable conductors onto anything, including elastic materials and fabrics,” said Rebecca Kramer, one of the researchers. After all, if the circuits are made from liquid metal, they can be stretched, folded, squeezed, and so on and so forth, without breaking.
The technique is called “mechanically sintered gallium-indium nanoparticles,” because liquid metal needs to be converted into nanoparticles first before it can be used as ink, done by immersing the alloy into a solvent like ethanol and bombarding the resultant mixture with ultrasound to disperse the liquid metal. The resultant printed circuits are protected by a “skin’ that prevents electrical conductivity that can be removed by stamping or scraping the printout to choose which part of the circuit to activate.
We feel that this process will also allow for thinner wearable electronics so it’s likely to be a matter of years before this tech actually jumps onto the market still but it’s pretty evident the future is pretty close. Now where’s our self lacing shoes?
via Engadget
You might be interested in
Taste food off your phone with Maxis Screen Savour!
Boston Dynamics shows off a new mechanical robot dog
Cicret Bracelet might be the ultimate wearable device
