flexible electronics tagged posts

What if electronic circuits could be created simply by drawing lines with a pencil on paper or leaves—and then immediately applied to soft robots or skin-attached health monitoring devices? Korean researchers have developed an electronic materials technology that forms electrically conductive liquid metal in a fine powder form, allowing circuits to be drawn directly on a wide variety of surfaces.

This technology presents new possibilities for next-generation flexible electronics, including applications on paper and plastic as well as in soft robotic systems and wearable devices. The research was published in Advanced Functional Materials.

A research team led by Distinguished Professor Inkyu Park from the Departm...

Conductive ink is a great tool for printing flexible electronic circuits on surfaces. But these inks can be costly, they do not work on some materials, and devices to apply them can plug up. Now, scientists report in ACS Applied Electronic Materials that they have developed inexpensive conductive inks for clog-free ballpoint pens that can allow users to “write” circuits almost anywhere — even on human skin.

Flexible electronics are widely used in applications such as biosensors, electronic skin and energy storage...

A new fundamental understanding of polymeric relaxor ferroelectric behavior could lead to advances in flexible electronics, actuators and transducers, energy storage, piezoelectric sensors and electrocaloric cooling, according to a team of researchers at Penn State and North Carolina State.

Researchers have debated the theory behind the mechanism of relaxor ferroelectrics for more than 50 years, said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. While relaxor ferroelectrics are well-recognized, fundamentally fascinating and technologically useful materials, a Nature article commented in 2006 that they were heterogeneous, hopeless messes.

Without a funda...

Researchers present the first fully integrated flexible electronics made of magnetic sensors and organic circuits which opens the path towards the development of electronic skin. Human skin is a fascinating and multifunctional organ with unique properties originating from its flexible and compliant nature. It allows for interfacing with external physical environment through numerous receptors interconnected with the nervous system. Scientists have been trying to transfer these features to artificial skin for a long time, aiming at robotic applications...