Printing PCBs with CHEMCUBED Silver Nanoparticle Ink
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- This video was sponsored by ChemCubed
Check out their website here: www.nathanbuil...
In this episode I check out ChemCubed's booth at RAPID + TCT 2023 to learn how about printing PCBs using Silver Nanoparticle Inks. With their printer and inks you can print nearly pure silver circuits on a variety of substrates with very fast turnarounds. You can print on thin layers of inexpensive plastic, traditional FR-4, or even glass.
We mostly talked about their silver nanoparticle inks in this video, but they also specialize in producing other resins and inks using nanoparticle technology. They use nanoparticles to produce materials and composites with unique characteristics in terms of the material properties and processing requirements that might otherwise be unobtainable with traditional approaches in polymer and material science.
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Great stuff!
What a time to be alive. This is nuts.
Amaizing. Thank you for sharing with us.
OMG! this is so cool, love these types of videos, I'm going to make my way around and watch more, technology and innovation is always so intreiging to me. Thanks for a great video, Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend!
Knownpcb’s quality and service are unmatched in the PCB industry. Highly recommended!
This is insanely revolutionary. Like, this is the future of PCBs.
I wonder what the unit cost would be at scale. It is pretty crazy though, especially the huge choice of substrates
@@NathanBuildsRobots I'm curious though after seeing that there's other companies pursuing this tech. What did these guys have that is unique to them? Did they have anything proprietary about their version of the tech?
Incredible technology, I find this really exciting. This sort of technology has the potential to bring a lot of electronics manufacturing back to Europe, USA, Canada etc, especially once the product managers and designers start to embrace the design freedom this unleashes.
I’d like to have some stuff printed with them, seems like it’s be a really fun machine to use and pay around with. There were some other techniques that I cut, but he described them. You can lay down a little dielectric template, the. Flood the board like with flood irrigation in farming, and it fills all of the channels you made up with the ink, and it can make pretty thick traces, I think I saw 250 or 500 microns thick layers on one of the prints. With pure silver that is a lot of current carrying capacity
@@NathanBuildsRobots Amazing tech. A while back I was motorising a 1.3m camera slider and had to learn about the Trinamic 5130 to drive the stepper I wanted to use (loads of torque), and I poured over the Trinamic TDS and schematics, and I became fascinated with the design of the PCB that held their chip... led me on an excursion into electronics, and I'm hoping to use some of what I learned in future 3d printed projects...
I need one of those in my life.
Me too. It looks expensive though 🤑
This is really cool, but it looks like its gonna be for the 10-40K market. I would love to see something like this but for a consumer a high end consumer. The closest thing i have seen was the VOLTERA. But it uses a very unsophisticated process of basically using a cheap cnc router with a bloody silver tip pen to draw the routes. The problem with this is the resistance of the connections can be quite high and since the board has a lot of silver the process of creating boards is really expensive.
And here I am still etching boards, my boards are very simple though!
I have a small CNC that I occasionally make a board with but the failure rate was quite high until I got the feeds and speeds correct and even then its not a guaranteed job.
Yeah, the problem with normal silver inks is they have a lot of fillers. When you are making a composite of 2 materials, the less conductive material has a huge impact on resistivity. Especially when it is a dielectric like most adhesives are. Even if it’s 95% silver, it’s only going to be like 1% of the conductivity of pure silver because of the way the material is composed at the microscopic scale. It essentially has to hop from conductive particle to particle, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. When the matrix material is the conductor, it should fare much better. But when you’re just throwing silver particles into a nonconductive matrix, it ain’t going to work well.
Even if there is only a small fraction of the composition. So the high purity of the silver is key to getting low resistivity.
This is almost pure silver post-cure, so it’s nearly the same conductivity of silver.
@@AndrewAHayes yeah i had a cnc router for this as well. getting the traces right was a bloody feat. I found the best process was the toner transfer and ferric chloride methods. But They are really toxic. I just pcb way now and include multiple projects on one board that i break off myself. Easier/Cheaper. Just wish i had something at home that would make the prototyping process faster.
@@NathanBuildsRobots I had figured it was the conductivity of the silver that was the problem not the purity of the compound mixture. Seems like common sense but i never really thought about it.
This is awesome. A shame it will probably out of reach for a normal tinker person.
Advanced technology is rarely cheap. Nano particles probably aren’t the cheapest thing to synthesize. But given economies of scale, it might be affordable someday.
The cool thing to me is that it can be printed on low temperature materials, which means lots of common plastics and printed parts can be used. Imagine an FDM print where you pause on layer 69 or whatever, plop down a whole PCB, then keep printing the rest of the part.
Any idea how much this thing costs?
If you have to ask… 😂
I don’t know, I assume it’s in the 10s of thousands.