Publication in Advanced Materials:  

Turning Trash into Treasure: Additive Free MXene Sediment Inks for Screen‐Printed Micro‐Supercapacitors.

Adv. Mater. 2020, 2000716.

https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202000716

Thanks to advances in materials chemistry, researchers have been able to synthesize new materials that allow solution-based processing of next-generation optoelectronic materials.

In Printed Electronics, printing technologies are used to produce various kinds of devices, such as electronic circuits, sensors and solar cells. While in the initial phase, the field was dominated by organic conducting and semiconducting materials (Organic Electronics), today also printable hybrid or inorganic materials are used.

New challenges arise when small scale laboratory processes are transferred to industrially relevant methods.

In the “Functional Thin Film Solution Processing” group, we address scientific and engineering aspects of solution processing, namely

• to overcome the gap between lab-scale sample manufacturing and industrially relevant fabrication technologies. Solvent evaporation and film formation is by far less controlled when large area deposition techniques are employed.
• to develop novel ink formulations to meet the requirements for the deposition of materials by various high throughput-coating methods.
• to exploit spontaneous self-assembly related to solvent evaporation to add functionality to wet deposited films. 

Our coating laboratory provides infrastructure, workforce and knowhow for the deposition of functional coatings and protection layers on rigid and flexible substrates used for the fabrication of optical and electronic devices.

Available equipment at the coating laboratory will enable the development of thin film coating solutions up to DIN A5 scale. The laboratory will evaluate, develop and offer the best-suited technology and analytic for a given functional coating.