Additive Manufacturing of Zn with Submicron Resolution and its Conversion into Zn/ZnO core-shell structures

27 July 2022, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Electrohydrodynamic redox 3D printing (EHD-RP) is an additive manufacturing (AM) technique with submicron resolution and multi-metal capabilities, offering the possibility to switch chemistry during deposition ”on-the-fly”. Despite the potential for synthesizing a large range of metals by electrochemical small-scale AM techniques, to date, only Cu and Ag have been reproducibly deposited by EHD-RP. Here, we extend the materials palette available to EHD-RP by using aqueous solvents instead of organic solvents, as used previously. To demonstrate significant extension of potentially accessible metals, we show deposition of Cu and Zn from sacrificial anodes immersed in acidic aqueous solvents. Mass spectrometry indicates that the choice of the solvent is important to the deposition of pure Zn. Additionally, we show that the deposited Zn structures, 250 nm in width, can be partially converted into semiconducting ZnO structures by oxidation at 325 °C in air.

Keywords

microscale
nanoscale
3D printing
additive manufacturing
metal
3D Nanofabrication

Supplementary materials

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Title
Supplementary Information Additive_Manufacturing_of_Zn_with_Submicron_Resolution_and_its_Conversion_into_Zn_ZnO_core_shell_structures
Description
Further data from mass spectroscopy (Figure S1, S4), the results for a second printed material, copper, for comparison with previous printed materials (S2), details on printing with diluted nitric acid (S3), more TEM micrographs for as-printed zinc (S5), raw data for the volume calculations (S6), backgrounds for shown photoluminescence data (S7).
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