Additive manufacturing is a highly transformative technology. The ability to fabricate a physical component solely from digital designs offers many unique advantages that are not seen in conventional manufacturing techniques. One of these additive manufacturing processes, inkjet-3D-printing, has the capability to accurately construct 3D shapes while offering the option to utilize multiple different materials.
By making use of specialty inks, such as conductive inks and photopolymer inks, it becomes feasible to construct embedded electronic circuits in 3D solids, a concept referred to as structural electronics.
Several aspects of this process remain challenging, however: there is a wide variety of printable photopolymers, each with different printing requirements and material characteristics. Likewise, although conductive inks are commercially available, many formulations require intense post-processing or offer limited conductivity. Furthermore, there is an absence of open software tools dedicated to the design and integration of structural electronics for inkjet-3D-printing. 
In this thesis, the use of a TPGDA photopolymer in combination with a silver nanoparticle ink is investigated for the application of printing structural electronics. The materials are printed using a PIXDRO LP50 Inkjet printing platform equipped with Dimatix printheads. The TPGDA is cured with UV light, which results in accurate, millimeter-scale structures, although artifacts are present due to fluid interactions of the liquid photopolymer.
The silver nanoparticle ink, NovaCentrix Metallon JS-A211, is printed on the polymer substrate and sintered with intense UV light, a process known as photonic sintering. Circuit traces are consistently printable with a minimum width of 0.3mm, and a sheet resistance of 0.21 Ohm per layer has been achieved.
To support the fabrication process, a software tool is developed for pre-processing files for inkjet-3D-printing, and for designing and embedding electronic circuits. This tool is used to design a series of print tests, where the structural and conductive materials are combined to form structural electronics. In these print tests, the ability to incorporate electronic vias into the printed circuit is demonstrated. Additionally, electronic components are successfully soldered to the fabricated designs, and the ability to embed these components into the structural material is achieved.