A general ink formulation of 2D crystals for wafer-scale inkjet printing

Guohua Hu; Lisong Yang; Zongyin Yang; Yubo Wang; Xinxin Jin; Jie Dai; Qing Wu; Shouhu Liu; Xiaoxi Zhu; Xiaoshan Wang; Tien-Chun Wu; Richard C T Howe; Tom Albrow-Owen; Leonard W T Ng; Qing Yang; Luigi G Occhipinti; Robert I Woodward; Edmund J R Kelleher; Zhipei Sun; Xiao Huang; Meng Zhang; Colin D Bain; Tawfique Hasan

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba5029

A general ink formulation of 2D crystals for wafer-scale inkjet printing

Sci Adv. 2020 Aug 12;6(33):eaba5029. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba5029. eCollection 2020 Aug.

Authors

Guohua Hu^{1

2}, Lisong Yang³, Zongyin Yang¹, Yubo Wang^{1

4}, Xinxin Jin⁵, Jie Dai⁶, Qing Wu⁵, Shouhu Liu¹, Xiaoxi Zhu¹, Xiaoshan Wang⁶, Tien-Chun Wu¹, Richard C T Howe¹, Tom Albrow-Owen¹, Leonard W T Ng¹, Qing Yang⁴, Luigi G Occhipinti¹, Robert I Woodward^{7

8}, Edmund J R Kelleher^{7

9}, Zhipei Sun¹⁰, Xiao Huang⁶, Meng Zhang⁵, Colin D Bain³, Tawfique Hasan¹

Affiliations

¹ Cambridge Graphene Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0FA, UK.
² Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.
³ Department of Chemistry, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, UK.
⁴ College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
⁵ School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
⁶ Institute of Advanced Materials, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 210009, China.
⁷ Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK.
⁸ MQ Photonics, Department of Engineering, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia.
⁹ Quantum Matter Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
¹⁰ Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, QTF Centre of Excellence, Aalto University, Tietotie 3, FI-02150 Espoo, Finland.

Abstract

Recent advances in inkjet printing of two-dimensional (2D) crystals show great promise for next-generation printed electronics development. Printing nonuniformity, however, results in poor reproducibility in device performance and remains a major impediment to their large-scale manufacturing. At the heart of this challenge lies the coffee-ring effect (CRE), ring-shaped nonuniform deposits formed during postdeposition drying. We present an experimental study of the drying mechanism of a binary solvent ink formulation. We show that Marangoni-enhanced spreading in this formulation inhibits contact line pinning and deforms the droplet shape to naturally suppress the capillary flows that give rise to the CRE. This general formulation supports uniform deposition of 2D crystals and their derivatives, enabling scalable and even wafer-scale device fabrication, moving them closer to industrial-level additive manufacturing.

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