Yang Cao
Montana State University, MT·Engineering
Modern electronics are moving into three dimensions, with stacked transistors and 3D integrated circuits. Direct printing is a simple, cheap and clean alternative to photolithography and etching for making custom electronics.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
3D printing
additive manufacturing
electrohydrodynamic printing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Use machine learning to map how the composition of metallic nanoparticle inks controls their rheological (flow) properties, speeding up ink development for electrohydrodynamic (EHD) 3D printing.
- Investigate how intense pulsed light sinters, or fuses, metallic nanoparticles within 3D micropatterns, filling a gap left by existing studies based on 2D thin-film models.
- Establish intense pulsed light assisted EHD 3D printing, in which light flashes solidify printed structures as they are built, and use it to fabricate 3D integrated microelectronics.
More about the research
However, most 3D printers struggle at the microscale. Either their resolution is too low, or the printed structures collapse without support. This project aims to print microscale 3D electronics directly, with possible uses in metamaterials, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS, tiny machines on chips) and biomedical devices.
Why it matters
Being able to print microscale 3D electronics directly could give a cheaper, faster route for prototyping custom devices such as 3D integrated circuits, MEMS, metamaterials and biomedical devices. Machine-learning-guided ink design could also cut the time and material wasted on trial-and-error formulation for researchers and manufacturers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yiwei Han
University of Mississippi, MS·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how extrusion-printed shape-changing structures affect electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing, a high-resolution method that jets fine droplets with an electric field, and how EHD deposition speed affects resolution and impact damage.
Arunkumar Subramanian
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Engineering
Test whether nanoscale nozzles with on-chip electrodes enable sub-continuum nano-dripping, ejecting droplets smaller than 20 nanometers under very low electric stress, using the silicon-based SNAP-Chip printer.
Roozbeh Salary
Marshall University, WV·Engineering
Identify the airflow effects that set feature size and resolution in aerosol jet printing, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of how gas and ink droplets move.
The school
Montana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $258M a year on research, 85 research doctorates a year.
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