Arben Merkoçi – Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (ICN2)

Fast prototyping of electronic devices including biosensors is of great importance to reach the demand for cost/efficient technologies with interest for industries including “Maker” or “Do It Yourself” communities. Between various nanomaterials, graphene is emerging as a very interesting alternative building block for such devices given advantageous optical and electronic properties beside robustness, low cost and easy to obtain procedures. In this context we developed a simple and versatile graphene oxide printing technology using wax printed membranes for the fast patterning and water activation transfer through pressure- based mechanisms. The wax printed membranes have 50 ?m resolution, longtime stability and infinite shaping capability. The use of these membranes complemented with the vacuum filtration of graphene oxide provides the control over the thickness. Our demonstration provides a solvent free methodology for printing graphene oxide devices in all shapes and all substrates using the roll-to-roll automatized mechanism present in the wax printing machine. Graphene oxide was transferred over a wide variety of substrates as textile or plastics in between others. Our patented technology ( https://www.google.com/patents/WO2015193486A1?cl=en) on graphene patterning is already in use by Biolin Scientific (Sweden) who already launched the first graphene-based sensors with interest for biosensing applications ( http://www.biolinscientific.com/product/q-sense-sensors/). Based on our patented technology (graphene patterning for electronic devices) a Spin Off company (GraphenicaLab) is already created.

Reference

Baptista-Pires L, Mayorga-Martínez CC, Medina-Sánchez M, Montón H & Merkoçi A 2016, ‘Water Activated Graphene Oxide Transfer Using Wax Printed Membranes for Fast Patterning of a Touch Sensitive Device’, ACS Nano, 10 (1), pp. 853–860.