Conductive Ink / Paste

Carbon conductive ink paste: Carbon materials are used as the additives in conductive inks. These have been widely applied in the field of printed electronics, especially the graphene and carbon nanotubes due to their exceptional chemical, mechanical, electrical, and optical properties; they can greatly improve the performance of conductive inks.

Carbon nanotubes and graphene have been widely used as conductive fillers for carbon conductive ink. Carbon-conductive inks are utilized to substitute gold, manufacture resistors, cross-over conductors, shielding surfaces and in place of discrete resistors, etc. Expensive precious metal coatings very often can be dispensed with and in addition it is possible to replace double-sided plated-through hole circuits by single-sided printed circuit boards.

Carbon-conductive inks are employed for the production of laminate keyboards. The entire conductor pattern and the contact areas are printed on plastic film, such as polyester or polyimide, using carbon-conductive inks. For this application, either two separate films are utilized or one film, the two sections of which are folded together. There is an insulating separator film between the two films and the entire laminate keyboard is masked by a printed cover foil.

Carbon inks for screen printing are commercially established technology; especially in applications, for instance, blood glucose sensors. Carbon-conductive inks exhibit good sliding properties. Carbon black, have been utilized in the manufacture of inks and coatings for a range of printed electronic applications involving batteries and supercapacitors, electrochemical sensors, PCB resistors printed heaters and more recently in solar energy harvesting.

Carbon conductive ink paste has a host of favorable characteristics that allow them to be used in these applications including chemical inertness, the ability to be modified or functionalized in the case of electrochemical sensors and ability to act as intercalating materials in the case of energy storage, as well as low cost and disposability.