Flexible electronics have the potential to revolutionize medicine, but making it biocompatible and at a reasonable cost is a challenge. Scientists at Graphene Flagship, a European research initiative, working at the University of Manchester, UK and the University of Pisa, Italy, have developed biocompatible conductive inks that off-the-shelf ink-jet printers can use to interconnect components inside flexible electronic devices.
The water-based inks contain graphene, the amazing sheets of carbon only an atom thick, as well as hexagonal boron nitride, an insulator, semiconductor transition metal dichalcogenides, and xantham gum to make it all stick together. They can be printed onto a variety of materials, including flexible plastics and rigid glass. Because it works with different materials, composite and multi-layered devices consisting of different formulations can be created thanks to the new inks.
So far these inks have been used to print photodetectors and read-only computer memory, though understandably not much of it.
The biocompatibility of the inks has been tested in lab experiments pointing to overall safety, but animal toxicology studies will still be required to confirm that.
Study in Nature Nanotechnology: Water-based and biocompatible 2D crystal inks for all-inkjet-printed heterostructures…
Via: Graphene Flagship…
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