Capillary stamping of functional materials: parallel additive substrate patterning without ink depletion

TL;DR

This paper introduces capillary stamping with mesoporous silica stamps as a parallel additive patterning technique that overcomes ink depletion issues, enabling high-throughput, versatile patterning of functional materials.

Contribution

It presents a novel capillary stamping method using mesoporous silica stamps for parallel additive patterning without ink depletion, expanding material and throughput capabilities.

Findings

Successfully patterned drug nanoparticles, metallopolymer-derived ceramics, and nanodiamonds.

Achieved regular nanoparticle arrangements via post-stamping pyrolysis.

Demonstrated broad ink compatibility and potential for high-throughput manufacturing.

Abstract

Patterned substrates for optics, electronics, sensing, lab-on-chip technologies, bioanalytics, clinical diagnostics as well as translational and personalized medicine are typically prepared by additive substrate manufacturing including ballistic printing and microcontact printing. However, ballistic printing (e.g., ink jet and aerosol jet printing, laser-induced forward transfer) involves serial pixel-by-pixel ink deposition. Parallel additive pattering by microcontact printing is performed with solid elastomeric stamps suffering from ink depletion after a few stamp-substrate contacts. The throughput limitations of additive state-of-the-art patterning thus arising may be overcome by capillary stamping - parallel additive substrate patterning without ink depletion by mesoporous silica stamps, which enable ink supply through the mesopores anytime during stamping. Thus, either arrays of substrate-bound nanoparticles or colloidal nanodispersions of detached nanoparticles are accessible. We processed three types of model inks: 1) drug solutions, 2) solutions containing metallopolymers and block copolymers as well as 3) nanodiamond suspensions representing colloidal nanoparticle inks. Thus, we obtained aqueous colloidal nanodispersions of stamped drug nanoparticles, regularly arranged ceramic nanoparticles by post-stamping pyrolysis of stamped metallopolymeric precursor nanoparticles and regularly arranged nanodiamond nanoaggregates. Capillary stamping may overcome the throughput limitations of state-of-the-art additive substrate manufacturing while a broad range of different inks can be processed.