Directly printing high-resolution, high-performance 3D curved electronics based on locally polarized electric-field-driven vertical jetting

Abstract

The applications of 3D curved electronics, such as conformal antennas, smart aircraft skins, and structural health monitoring, encompass a wide range of applications. However, the integrated fabrication of 3D curved multilayer electronics with high resolution and high performance remains a major challenge, especially on free-form surfaces. Here, a novel conformal 3D printing technique based on locally polarized electric-field-driven (LP-EFD) vertical jet printing has been proposed for the fabrication of high-resolution, high-performance 3D curved electronic devices. The simulation results demonstrate that it has a highly stable and symmetric distributed electric field to produce a steady and vertically downward jet, ensuring high-precision and high-resolution 3D curved/conformal printing. The printing parameters were optimized by exploring their effect on line width and printing consistency. Several typical 3D curved circuits such as single-layer circuit patterns on different curved surface, multilayer circuit patterns on cylindrical structure surfaces, and curved transparent heaters have been printed successfully. The resulting circuits achieve the smallest line width of 8 μm, the largest height difference of 50 mm, and high line width consistency (less than ±3.7 %). The fabricated 3D curved circuit exhibits excellent conductivity of 4.44×10⁷ S/m and high adhesion (resistance changes less than 1 % after 100 times peeling). The proposed fabrication method provides a novel solution for exploring high-resolution 3D curved conformal circuits and curved multilayer electronic devices.