Metal Painting by Plasma Jet

Conducting metal interconnections are essential to link electronic components or multiple circuits for electronic device fabrication. Scalable, rapid, and sustainable methods for printing adherent metal interconnections on dielectric materials are lacking, which stifles the development of new electronic consumer devices. Here a breakthrough single-step and rapid process to deposit highly conducting metal tracks is introduced, using an atmospheric pressure plasma jet. The deposition process used a rudimentary aqueous solution of metal salts as ink, that was introduced as a mist into a helium plasma gas. The metal salt was reduced and deposited with spatiotemporal control using a plasma jet generated at radio frequency with 15 W power at room temperature and pressure. The conductive metal layers were highly adhesive on glass, ceramics, polymeric materials, even biological surfaces such as plant leaves and animal skin, depostedwith little damage to the substrate. The conductivity of deposited tracks on glass shows 50.8 ± 8.6% and 5.2 ± 1.6% of bulk silver and copper metal conductivity respectively.