Thermoresistive characteristics of sintered inkjet printed gold nanoparticle microstructures

This paper presents the thermoresistive characteristics of hexanethiol encapsulated gold nanoparticles (NPs), inkjet printed onto Corning 0215 glass and sintered in air. The use of organic encapsulated metal NP precursors enables the growing field inkjet printed microsystems to build low-cost sensors and actuators on non-traditional substrates. However, this technology requires post-deposition thermal steps to sublimate organics and induce NP sintering. The resulting microstructures can have unique characteristics, giving rise to new sensing capabilities. Gold NP microstructures were patterned using inkjet printing and sintered under varied conditions. Four-point resistance measurements were performed on a hotplate to characterize the thermoresistive response of the resulting microstructures between 25°C and 150°C. Temperature coefficients of resistance (TCR) of 2000 and 2300 ppm/°C±10% have been measured for Au-NP films sintered at 175 and 225°C, respectively.