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Disposable Heater Arrays Using Printed Silver Patterns on Polyethylene Terephthalate for Multipurpose Applications
Author(s) -
Walia Sunil,
Gupta Ritu,
Kulkarni Giridhar U.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
energy technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.91
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 2194-4296
pISSN - 2194-4288
DOI - 10.1002/ente.201402204
Subject(s) - materials science , heating element , optoelectronics , thermal resistance , joule heating , polyethylene terephthalate , screen printing , thermal , nanotechnology , composite material , physics , meteorology
Flexible, semitransparent and robust heating arrays have been designed by grayscale printing as ready‐to‐use devices for point‐of‐care application. A perforated Ag mesh is first fabricated with tunable features by controllably varying the toner grayscale value during laser printer on PET. The resistance could be varied between 1 to 2 Ω by tuning the Ag fill factor from 50 to 70 %. The Ag/PET heater based on joule heating is able to attain highly stable temperatures upto ∼135 °C maintained over long hours. Since temperature is directly related to resistance, this provides a fine temperature knob without any cumbersome processing steps. The merit of design allows individual heating elements to attain stable temperatures at low voltages (∼1.5 V) without any interference from neighboring heaters of the array, thus resulting in a thermal library. A laptop USB with 5.1 V output is able to power the thermal library for temperatures in the range of 30–60 °C, useful in many practical applications. It is a multipurpose disposable chip for in‐situ transmission microscopy that can be utilized for bioassay and point‐of‐care diagnostics, as demonstrated in the study.