Functional Additive Manufacturing for Printable & Networkable Sensors to Detect Energetics and Other Threat Materials

Chemiresistors are an important class of electronic sensors that detect the presence of analytes/chemicals via a change in the resistance of a sensor element. A typical interdigitated electrode array is deposited onto an insulating substrate with metallic electrodes that have feature sizes in the 5-500 m range. The metal electrodes are typically sputter coated onto the substrate, using lithographic and/or wet etching techniques. These techniques are costly and labor intensive. A 3D printing process that could fabricate the interdigitated electrodes, chemically resistive sensing element and associated electronics would provide the sensor community with a significant technological advancement, in terms of ease of manufacture, cost and functionality. DeLUX Engineering proposes to design, fabricate and test a new chemical sensing platform based on multimaterial additive manufacturing. Specifically, we propose developing new chemical sensing inks and fabrication processes where a single 3D printing system is used to fabricate substrates, metallic traces/electrodes, functionalized sensing material (e.g. metallic nanoparticle composite inks, chemically tailored MOFs, ), electronic processing and wireless communication circuits. We additionally propose a 3D printed architecture in which a large number of functionalized sensing layers can be combined to sense a host of analytes with improved specificity, reliability and low cost and power.