Laser fabrication of fully printed graphene oxide microsensor

Fully printed microsensors are widely used in daily life to monitor various parameters of health, environment, and food, etc. However, the fabrication of fully printed microsensors still suffers from multiple procedures and excessive devices. Herein, a facile approach using combinational laser micromachining techniques with the same laser is developed to fabricate fully printed microsensors. Three individual laser-based micromachining processes, i.e., laser induced forward transfer (LIFT), laser sintering and blister-actuated LIFT, are firstly studied to select the appropriate parameters for silver line printing, silver line sintering and graphene oxide (GO) line printing. Subsequently, typical humidity microsensors composed of a silver based electrode and a sensing element are successfully created by LIFT of silver interdigital electrodes (IDEs) structure, laser sintering of IDEs, and blister-actuated LIFT of GO film. The fully printed microsensor with five layers of GO film exhibits a capacitance sensitivity of 24600% and hysteresis of less than 8% in sensing humidity. And the response and recovery time are approximately 9 and 5 s at relative humidity (RH) lower than 84%, respectively. These results indicate that the developed method using combinational laser micromachining techniques is capable of fabricating fully printed microsensors with different kinds of materials, which makes the strategy excellent candidate for the future development of high performance and low cost microsensors.

Automated summary

The study introduced a new approach for fabricating fully printed microsensors using combinational laser micromachining techniques, which showed high sensitivity and short response time.