Nanostructured Thermoelectric Films Synthesised by Spark Ablation and Their Oxidation Behaviour: Nanomaterials

Reducing the thermal conductivity of thermoelectric materials has been a field of intense research to improve the efficiency of thermoelectric devices. One approach is to create a nanostructured thermoelectric material that has a low thermal conductivity due to its high number of grain boundaries or voids, which scatter phonons. Here, we present...

Spark Ablated Metal Oxide Nanoparticles for Gas Sensing

Metal oxide nanoparticle gas sensors showpromise due to their high sensitivity towards a wide range of gases, low costs, and low complexity. Particle sizes at nanometers offer a high surface-to-volume ratio which provides more areas on the surface where reactions can occur. This work presents the application of spark ablated nanoparticles on...

Mass and density determination of porous nanoparticle films using a quartz crystal microbalance

A method is presented to directly measure the mass output of an impaction printer coupled with a spark ablation generator. It is based on a quartz crystal microbalance and shown to be reliable in quantifying mass deposition rate. Here, the method is demonstrated with an Au nanoparticle aerosol synthesized under several spark ablation and...

ZnO Nanoparticle Printing for UV Sensor Fabrication

In this work, a novel microfabrication-compatible production process is demonstrated and used to fabricate UV photoresistors made from ZnO nanoparticles. It comprises a simple room-temperature production method for synthesizing and direct-writing nanoparticles. The method can be used on a wide range of surfaces and print a wide range of...

Patterning of fine-features in nanoporous films synthesized by spark ablation

Advances in semiconductor device manufacturing technologies are enabled by the development and application of novel materials. Especially one class of materials, nanoporous films, became building blocks for a broad range of applications, such as gas sensors and interconnects. Therefore, a versatile fabrication technology is needed to...

Synthesis of Carbon nanofibers (CNFs) by PECVD using Ni catalyst printed by spark ablation

The precise control of patterned arrays of carbon nanofibers (CNFs) is an issue of interest in a wide range of applications. In the present work, we report the synthesis of CNFs grown by plasma-enhanced CVD (PECVD) from a Ni catalyst patterned via aerosol printing of nanoparticles (NPs) by a spark ablation technique. The printing speeds were...

Synthesis of PdO-USPION via Spark Ablation: For Thermal Ablation and Contrast Enhancement

Conventional early-stage breast cancer treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and external radiotherapy despite their proven short-term efficacy tend to have adverse long-term physiological and psychological implications on the patients. This is primarily due to their inability to spare healthy tissue surrounding the tumor...

High Step Coverage Interconnects By Printed Nanoparticles

The growing diversity in the used materials in semiconductor packaging provides challenges for achieving good interconnection. Particularly the very soft substrates, such as paper and polymers, and very hard, such as silicon carbide, offer unique challenges to wire-bonding or formation of vertical interconnects. Complementary technologies are...

Dual-Gate Fet-Based Charge Sensor Enhanced by In-Situ Electrode Decoration in a MEMS Organs-On-Chip Platform

Continuous monitoring of tissue microphysiology is a key enabling feature of the organ-on-chip (OoC) approach for drug screening and disease modeling. Sensing charged species in OoC tissue microenvironments is thereby essential. However, the inherently small (i.e., cm) size of OoC devices poses the challenging requirement to integrate...

Aerosol Direct Writing and Thermal Tuning of Copper Nanoparticle Patterns as Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Sensors

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates are of great interest for detecting low-concentrated analytes. However, issues such as multistep processing, cost, and possible presence of hazardous substances in the fabrication still represent a significant drawback. In this paper, an innovative direct writing method is introduced for...

Industrial Integration of Aerosol Route to Nanofinishing of Highly Effective Antibacterial Textiles

In the field of nanotechnology, the need to develop a green process for the production of nanoparticles brought into light the concept of nanoparticle aerosol generation. A novel method to produce an aerosol by synthesizing nanoparticles of conductive material having a potential to be scaled up is by spark ablation. Nanosized particulate...

Precursor-Less Coating of Nanoparticles in the Gas Phase

This article introduces a continuous, gas-phase method for depositing thin metallic coatings onto (nano)particles using a type of physical vapor deposition (PVD) at ambient pressure and temperature. An aerosol of core particles is mixed with a metal vapor cloud formed by spark ablation by passing the aerosol through the spark zone using a hollow...