Symposium MA01-Advanced Materials for Analog and Digital Functional Printing

Scope of the Symposium is to collect innovative ideas and material development in the field of materials printing. Materials for printing - adapting traditional printing technologies (analog and digital) to manufacture two- and three-dimensional functionalities for a wide range of applications is an increasing focus of R&D. Advances in material science and nanotechnology are a prominent part in this transition. Both play a significant role in the facilitation of the new additive manufacturing and bio fabrication technologies such as high-performance electronic and photovoltaic devices, highly-sensitive chemical and biological sensors, biological materials and structures, wearables.

This subject has promised to revolutionize the manufacturing of a) electronic devices in Printed Electronics, achieving very low fabrication costs of large area devices thanks to additive, low temperature processes, and in our daily life, promoting the ubiquitous applications of microelectronics and sensors in wearable components and conformable devices. In addition, b) biofabrication and 3D-bioprinting, achieving the construction of biological structures and tissues that can be deployed for regenerative medicine and tissue replacement.

Additive fabrication process is in contrast to traditional micro-fabrication processes that rely critically on subtractive patterning. Nanostructured / nanoengineered materials are ideal additive building blocks for additive processes such as those used in Printed Electronics or Biofabrication, since they allow control over size distribution, dimensionality and carrier wavefunctions confinement, any physical / biological / chemical property.

Traditional high throughput printing of plastic sheets, paper, fabric, is done using fast rotary machines. Printed Electronics technologies involve the same analog process, in particular screen printing, gravure printing / imprinting, flexographic printing.

The contact between the transferred ink and the desired substrate, its subsequent motion under the joint influence of surface tension interaction with the substrate, the evaporation of the solvent, the time-dependent viscosity of the variable mass ink system, the interaction with the ambient in terms of temperature and humidity, the post-printing treatments to induce functional properties (e-beam, light, UV, laser, thermal, microwave, magnetic, etc.), are all examples of the aspects evaluated by actual research. Besides this, digital processing involves a layer by layer construction of two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects using a liquid ink fed into a printhead, operated by an electronic driver thanks to a transducer (piezoelectric, piroelectric, magnetostrictive, electroacustic, magnetohydrodynamic, etc). Biofabrication involves processes like inkjet printing, bioplotting and other dispensing technologies. Bioinks consist of biocompatible polymers, biological molecules from natural sources and cells.

• Digital Printing (thermal inkjet, piezoelectric, magnetohydrodynamic, new approaches, fully printed circuits, new functional inks like CNTs, graphene, graphene oxide, sintering, electronic, magnetic, surface and photonic properties of printed materials)
• Analog Printing (roll-to-roll, gravure, flexography, rotary serigraphy, fully printed circuits, new functional inks, electronic, magnetic, surface and photonic properties of printed materials)
• Emerging Roll-to-Roll equipments (R2R Sputtering, R2R Atomic Layer Deposition)
• 3D-Printing, Biofabrication and Bioprinting using Microfluidics, 3D-Printing/Bioprinting in the Life Sciences
• Additive Manufacturing and other platforms for Biofabrication in the Life Sciences and for Printed Electronics
• Substrate Materials – Biomaterials, Synthetic Smart Polymers, Nanocellulose, Paper, Silk, Technopolymers
• Technologies (UV radiation, plasma treatments, laser drilling and processing)

• Mario Caironi (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy)
• Craig Armiento (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA)
• Aoife Celoria (NovaCentrix, USA)
• Amy Elliot (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
• Elvira Fortunato (CENIMAT, Portugal)
• Paul Gatenholm (Chalmers University, Sweden)
• Monica Katiyar (National Centre for Flexible Electronics, India)
• Cornelia Lee-Thedieck (Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
• Ronald Osterbacka (Abo Akademi University, Finland)
• David Stüwe (Notion Systems GmbH, Germany)