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 micron range. The metal electrodes are typically sputter coated onto the substrate, using lithographic and/or wet etching techniques. These techniques are costly, labor, and logistically 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 refine, fabricate and test new chemical sensing platforms based on multimaterial additive manufacturing. Specifically, we propose to incorporate new chemical sensing inks and manufacturing processes using a single 3D printing system to fabricate substrates, metallic traces/electrodes, deposit functionalized sensing materials, electronic processing and wireless communication circuits. We additionally propose to incorporate 3D printed array architectures in which a large number of functionalized sensing layers can be combined to sense a variety of hazardous analytes with improved specificity, reliability, low power, small footprint, long-range remote communications, and reduced cost.