Aerosol Jet Printing of Miniaturized, Low Power Flexible Micro-Hotplates

We report on printed flexible micro-hotplates operating at high temperature at lower power consμmption than ever reported using aerosol jet printing of fine metallic conductor features. Efficient heating (i.e., 40 mW at 325 °C) was produced by reducing the effective heating area and substrates thickness. Gold (Au) nanoparticles solution was used for printing micro-hotplates of two different sizes, i.e., 500 × 500 μm2 and 300 × 300 μm2, on 50 μm- and 13 μm-thick PI substrates, respectively. Comsol simulations were used to optimize the thermal design of micro-hotplates. Their power consμmption at 325 °C was of 54 mW for the large hotplate and of 40 mW for the smaller design. These results validate the simple manufacturing of high temperature and power efficient flexible micro-hotplates for applications such as in portable gas and chemical sensors, thermal metrology, etc.