Rice Engineers 3D Print Electronics With Focused Microwaves, Bypassing a Decade-Long Barrier - 3DPrinting.com

• Rice Engineers 3D Print Electronics With Focused Microwaves, Bypassing a Decade-Long Barrier April 15

Rice University researchers have developed a 3D-printing process that uses focused microwaves to heat electronic ink during fabrication without damaging surrounding materials, solving a problem that’s blocked the field for more than a decade. The work, published April 13 in Science Advances, could enable a new class of hybrid electronic devices that weren’t previously possible to build. The core obstacle has always been thermal processing. Printing functional electronics requires heating the ink to activate it, but that heat destroys the temperature-sensitive materials underneath. Yong Lin Kong, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, and longtime collaborator John Ho, an associate professor at the National University of