Characterizing the Conductivity of Aerosol Jet Printed Silver Traces on Glass Using Intense Pulsed Light (IPL)

Aerosol Jet Printing is a novel micron-scale printing technology capable of handling a variety of materials due to a large print material viscosity range and high substrate standoff distance of 3–5 mm. To finalize the properties of printed materials, a form of post-processing is often required. A current widely applicable post-processing technique exists in traditional oven curing. However, oven curing greatly restricts the viable substrates as well as curing time. Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) offers the chance to greatly expand this substrate variety and decrease curing time. However, limited models currently exist to relate the finished material properties to the unique settings of current IPL technology. In this paper, an experiment is developed through a General Full Factorial Design of Experiments (DOE) model to characterize conductivity of Ag ink using IPL as a post processing technique. This is conducted through Novacentrix Ag ink (JSA426) by 3 × 3 mm Van der Pauw sensor pads cured using IPL. Sample pads were generated in triplicate over a range of Energy Levels, Counts and Durations for IPL and the resulting conductivity measured. The collected conductivity data was then analyzed using ANOVA to determine the significant interactions. From this, a regression model is developed to predict the conductivity for any Energy-Count-Duration value. The methods employed are applicable to any post-processing technique, and further optimization of the model is proposed for future work.