Investigating, implementing and testing solutions to eliminate the drift in the resistance of ceramic thick film printed heaters in order to ensure a stable operation.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Datec Coating Inc. is "a Canadian technology company that specializes in heating solutions that enablemanufacturers to optimize the performance of their products". Their core business lies around their patentedunique thick film technology involving a processing temperature under 400°C that enables printing heatingelements directly onto a wide range of materials, including low melting point materials, such as aluminum, andmaterials where thermal expansion mismatch would be a severe issue with other processes, such as mica,giving its customers a unique design flexibility for a wide-range of application and products. While manypossible new applications of Datec thick film process are envisioned, the technology is limited by drifts in theresistance of their resistive heaters. While mostly benign for their present line of business, this drift, could bedetrimental to some of Datec's prospective customers' applications. During the Engage project with Datec thathas been recently completed, a thorough investigation on the nature of the resistance drift in Datec's printedheater was performed. Structural and chemical analysis of Datec's printed resistors, performed by X-raydiffractometry, Raman spectroscopy, and thermo-gravimetric analysis, lead to the development of a theoryinvolving the presence of metastable transition components and their hydration when exposed to atmospherichumidity. Once the cause of the resistance drift was identified, preliminary investigations on possible solutionswere performed and a limited number of viable solutions proposed. Initial results on the first two solutionsproposed revealed that these ideas lead to appreciable improvements in the resistor structure and performances.The objective of this continuing project is now to implement the various solutions proposed, investigate theirefficacy, as well as the ease with which the solutions could be integrated into Datec's manufacturing process.The success of both the Engage and the present Engage PLUS project is meant to consolidate the existingcollaboration in order to explore and develop together the rapidly rising opportunities for business developmentin the more general and very promising field of printing of functional ceramics.