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Stretchable Electronic Materials that Meet the Demands



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Hello, everyone. I'm Andrew Baumbach. And I'm the Stretchable electronics product manager at ACI Materials. I'll do a brief overview of our our stretch portfolio and I'll start with talking a little bit about the patented cavitation processing tool that we use here to manufacture these inks.


And basically what we're doing is we're harnessing the power of cavitation, which you can think of as exploding microbubbles. And it allows us to achieve levels of dispersion that conventional mixing cannot achieve. And this is all done without damaging functional fillers, which can be a problem with with some mixing technology out there. And it's a very highly controlled process and it's all automated. And this helps give excellent batch to batch consistency.


And this is especially true when you're talking about carbon based materials to the particles high aspect ratio, things like carbon nanotubes, graphene, things like that that are extremely difficult to disperse.


And now going into the stretch product portfolio, I'll talk about the 11 and nine. This is our silver conductor. You can think of this as the interconnects and the bus bars that are used in wearable electronics. We'll go over some of the performance data on the next slide.


The SC 5025, that's the fixed resistance, stretchable heatsink. And so this is used for printing wearable heaters that heat very uniformly and you can do smaller resistors. I have an example later on of a 12 by 12 heater that we've done here and then we have the SI 1502, which is the printed carbon conductor typically used to encapsulate electrodes silver that's exposed and helps protect that while allowing access to the the conductivity.


And then the AC 3104 is the stretchable insulator and that's just printed over the circuitry and that helps protect it from the environment and mechanical abrasions and has great ability. So I'm going to go over a few things that we commonly get asked here. And that's basically the stretch performance being one one big one.


So here I have some graphs of our our performance. These are 76 millimeter by two millimeter. JThey all have an initial resistance of 0.9 ohms. So on the vertical here, you can kind of use that as a gauge factor as well. And on the left side, left side here on the chart. It shows the 20% stretch test which is done on fabric. So it's TPU that is bonded with an adhesive to the fabric and that stretched out 15.2 millimeters per second. So here you can see that in the performance that you start to get a nice leveling behavior and this is going out five, 5000 cycles. We have done testing hundreds of thousands of cycles and it does tend to go up a little bit, but it always recovers really nicely. And then on the right side here, we have two charts.


We have a 50% stretch, 100% stretch, 550 cycles respectively. And this is just on the TPU film because for the most part, fabric doesn't go past. I think 30% is the highest stretch fabric I've seen. So this is just on TPU and this really kind of shows the performance of the ink just by itself. So you can see that although it's going up, which you can expect that it would go up if you're doing a change in length.


To me, the telling thing is each cycle it's coming back down to a lower gauge factor. And in fact, if over time, as the TPU covers, it'll it'll drop closer and closer back to its original resistance. And then the 100% just kind of shows the durability of the ink. One of the key key requirements for a good stretch polymer thick film is that you can't have cracks developing while stretching. So our inks don't crack and they're highly durable. And the 100% you can see it's dropping back down, similar to how the 50% stretch did as well. So wash ability.


That's another big, big question that people have. I have I have a data set here that is showing a 15 wash cycle just wash and hang dry. So this would be kind of like following the garment manufacturer's instructions. We do other tests and we'll have more data sets in the future. But this is just showing that even after washing, you get a nice flat resistance. It doesn't change over time. In the graphics here, you can see that it's the heat remains uniform and it doesn't change over the wash cycles and the power output is also stable at a 2.5 AMP test. And these are just examples of some of the applications that we see a lot of interest in.


Biometric sensors got heart rate monitoring, just collecting signals from throughout the body and relaying it to a processor. And then, of course, the fix resistance heaters. We've seen a lot of interest in being washable, getting temperatures up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And then it's just not bulky. It doesn't have those wires and can go on to thinner base layers, things that are closer to the skin that you wouldn't necessarily want, you know, for traditional heaters, wearable heaters. And your time is almost up. And we're always interested to work with with people and new applications. And I encourage you to reach out to us and talk about your applications, and we can see what we can do for you. This is really durable ink and it has great, great potential for a lot of a lot of different areas.

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