University of Illinois – Conductive Ink

We will demonstrate rollerball pen printing of conductive inks on paper to create flexible electronics.  The pen represents a facile printing approach that is inexpensive, portable, and intuitive.  Standard surface mount or through-hole components are attached to the printed traces with conductive epoxy.  Magnet-based connectors are also used for individual components and to link the pen-drawn devices to an Aruduino board.  Scrolling LED displays, touch-sensitive keypads, and electronic origami will be demonstrated using the pen-on-paper (P-o-P) approach.

About Analisa Russo & Jennifer Lewis

Jennifer A. Lewis is the Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and the Director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (2005), the American Physical Society (2007), the Materials Research Society (2011), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012). Her research group designs viscoelastic inks for planar and 3D printing of functional materials. She is interested creating new materials and printing hardware for high tech, DIY, and STEM-related applications.

Analisa Russo is a Ph.D. student in the materials science and engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Her research focuses on designing conductive inks for printed electronics, including pen-on-paper (P-o-P) flexible electronics.  She is developed a silver ink that is compatible with rollerball pen writing to enable rapid fabrication of P-o-P devices.  She is now coupling these devices with programmable hardware, such as the Arduino system.  Recently, she has conducted P-o-P flexible electronics workshops at the Champaign-Urbana Fab Lab and at a materials science camp for high school girls.