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The clothes are great, of course, except that you have to carry their. Would not it be interesting if this feature is directly printed on your skin? Well, even if it's not for everyone, it seems like a possibility: CMU researchers have created a flexible and durable electronic temporary tattoo that could be used for all kinds of things.
It may sound familiar – we've been hearing about electronic tattoos for a while. But the previous methods were slow and limited, painting mainly with conductive ink or fixing a thin conductive film. If the idea has to take off, it must be easy to manufacture and apply. This is what the team hopes to have accomplished here.
"We are signaling a new way to create electronic tattoos," said Carmel Majidi, CMU, in a video of the university. "These are circuit boards printed on a temporary tattoo film. We print circuits composed of silver nanoparticles, then we coat these silver nanoparticles with a liquid metal alloy. The liquid metal merges with the silver to create these conductive threads on the tattoo; the tattoo can easily be transferred to the skin and the conductivity is high enough to support the digital circuit functionality. "
The big breakthrough, as Mahmoud Tavakoli, co-author, says in a press release, lies in the possibility of associating ink jet-printed nanoparticle patterns with each other. metal (a gallium-indium alloy) at room temperature.
"This is a breakthrough in the field of printed electronics," he said. "By eliminating the need for high temperature sintering, our technique is compatible with thin-film and heat-sensitive substrates."
In other words, it can easily be attached to fragile objects like a temporary, cheap and plentiful tattoo film, or perhaps to a bandage. Fortunately, tattoos are also very flexible, retaining their functions when they are distorted and do not erase easily.
The most obvious application is in the medical field, where a tattoo might perhaps replace a digital clamp or cuff heart monitor, or perhaps include chemical sensors that test blood sugar and alert the patient. user if it becomes too low. There are many other ways to apply a circuit mounted on a skin, but most have not yet been imagined. It may be time to brainstorm!
The document describing the electronic tattoo technique has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.
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