Inkjet printing, the digitally-controlled deposition of microdroplets onto a substrate, presents a number of potential advantages as a polymer additive manufacturing technique due to a relatively high spatial resolution and the ability to easily deposit multiple materials in one structure. It is, however, fundamentally limited by the low viscosity of the printed ink, which limits both the amount of solid phase present within the ink or necessitates the use of post-deposition curing of the ink to form the structure. Micro-reactive inkjet printing attempts to circumvent these limitations by exploiting the controlled in-air collision of two complementary reactive microdroplets, so as produce a microdroplet of the desired product before impact with the substrate. In this work, we explored the formation of polyaniline (PAni) on glass substrate through oxidative polymerisation of aniline in an acidic environment via a microreactive inkjet printing technique. We successfully printed different patterns of polyaniline onto glass substrates, as shown by microscopy and spectroscopy, and a conductivity of approximately 0.6 S cm-1 was achieved. We envision this printing technique to be particularly useful for a wide range of conducting polymer synthesis in the future.
Mei Ying Teo, Logan Stuart, Kean C. Aw, Jonathan Stringer, "Micro-Reactive Inkjet Printing of Polyaniline" in Proc. IS&T Printing for Fabrication: Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP34), 2018, pp 16 - 20, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2018.34.16