EuroWire May 2020

Transatlantic cable

To create the new conductive sheet, the Australian team took a thin lm of indium-tin oxide (ITO), a transparent material commonly used in mobile phone touchscreens, and, using liquid metal chemistry, shrunk it from three dimensions to two. The nano-thin sheets are compatible with existing electronic technologies, and because of their exibility could potentially be printed and manufactured through roll-to-roll (R2R) processing, much like a newspaper. Lead researcher, and RMIT research fellow, Torben Daeneke said that while ITO is transparent, and very conductive, it is also very brittle, so “we’ve taken an old material and transformed it from the inside to create a new version that’s supremely thin and exible. You can bend it, you can twist it, and you could make it far more cheaply and e ciently than the slow and expensive way that we currently manufacture touchscreens. “Turning it two-dimensional (2D) 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 ten per cent.” ITO manufacturing is currently a slow and expensive batch process, conducted in a vacuum chamber. “The beauty is that our approach doesn’t require expensive or specialised equipment – it could even be done in a home kitchen,” Mr Daeneke said. “We’ve shown it’s possible to create printable, cheaper electronics using ingredients you could buy from a hardware store, printing onto plastics to make touchscreens of the future.” The liquid metal printing method involves heating an indium-tin alloy to 200°C, where it becomes liquid, and then rolling it over

The PMIs suggest that the UK economy is growing at a quarterly rate of a little over 0.2 per cent, faster than at the end of 2019; but the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, speaking before the US Federal Reserve announced its interest rate cut, said that the economic impact of the virus could be large, and policymakers were working on possible responses. IHS Markit said, “There were a number of reports citing a negative impact on sales from the coronavirus outbreak, particularly to clients in overseas markets. The loss of momentum for incoming new business also contributed to the sharpest drop in backlogs of work since last September.” A PMI survey of the manufacturing sector showed factories were already struggling with increasing delays in their supply chains as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. New screen stays in touch A research team of collaborators from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Monash University and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET), led by researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, have developed an ultra-thin, ultra- exible, transparent electronic material. Reporting in Nature Electronics , the team explained that the touch-responsive material is 100 times thinner than existing touchscreen materials, and so pliable it can be rolled into a tube. Materials research

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May 2020