Improved Transfer Process for the Fully Additive Manufacturing of a Conductive Layer-Stacked Polymeric Cantilever

This paper reports on an efficient fabrication process for a polymeric cantilever covered with conductive nano silver. The entire structure can be constructed additively using a printing process, without the use of an etching process or a sacrificial layer. The fabricated cantilever exhibits good linearity and forms a submillimeter-ordered air gap between itself and the substrate surface. Fine operation of a capacitive force gauge was obtained using the capacitance between the conductive cantilever and an electrode on the substrate. This process is expected to make possible the efficient manufacturing of various types of sensors that measure mechanical strain in a cantilever structure.