| Researchers have developed an ultra-thin and ultra-flexible electronic material that could be printed and rolled out like newspaper, for the touchscreens of the future. | |
| The touch-responsive technology is 100 times thinner than existing touchscreen materials and so pliable it can be rolled up like a tube. | |
| To create the new conductive sheet, an RMIT University-led team used a thin film common in cell phone touchscreens and shrunk it from 3D to 2D, using liquid metal chemistry. | |
| The nano-thin sheets are readily compatible with existing electronic technologies and because of their incredible flexibility, could potentially be manufactured through roll-to-roll (R2R) processing just like a newspaper. | |
| The research, with collaborators from UNSW, Monash University and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET), is published in the journal Nature Electronics (“Flexible two-dimensional indium tin oxide fabricated using a liquid metal printing technique”). |
| Lead researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said most cell phone touchscreens were made of a transparent material, indium-tin oxide, that was very conductive but also very brittle. | |
| “We’ve taken an old material and transformed it from the inside to create a new version that’s supremely thin and flexible,” said Daeneke, an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at RMIT. | |
| “You can bend it, you can twist it, and you could make it far more cheaply and efficiently that the slow and expensive way that we currently manufacture touchscreens. | |
| “Turning it two-dimensional also makes it more transparent, so it lets through more light. | |
| “This means a cell phone with a touchscreen made of our material would use less power, extending the battery life by roughly 10%.” |
Image Credit: RMIT University
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