Direct write technologies for fabricating patterned metals and glasses

Abstract

In the past few decades direct writing became a widely pervasive approach to producing well defined patterns of a variety of materials. Due to its flexibility, this mask-less and etch-free patterning approach shows great potential for rapid prototyping and manufacturing purposes. This research aims to implement direct writing of challenging materials like metals and glasses, and also aims to achieve high resolution mask-less pattern printing with minimal pre-processing and post-processing requirements. This work looks at different technologies to achieve the aims of the research, and intensively study and develop two approaches which have the potential of achieving these aims. Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) technology is used to achieve electrospinning of glass nano-fibres of ~100nm diameter, which is the first report to record glass electro-spinning directly from glass melt. Spark-stream is another technology of direct writing, which uses electrical discharge to generate nanoparticles of a wide range of materials, with nanoparticle diameters of the range of 10 nm for gold, which is the main material explored in the spark-stream technology. These nanoparticles are focussed down to form micro-scale patterns using electrostatic "diffusion focussing" techniques. The nanoparticles are generated and focussed simultaneously and directly from the bulk material at room conditions.

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