Ultra-low-cost printed flexible sensors for disruptive IoT applications

探索新的加法制造模式对加拿大经济至关重要。可印刷柔性混合电子产品就是这些迅速崛起的领域之一。除了帮助培训高素质的人才、建立国际研究合作并与行业建立卓有成效的合作伙伴关系外，这项研究的长期影响将是提供新颖的低成本和高性能的可打印架构，作为从可穿戴电子设备到物联网的广泛传感应用的高性价比替代方案，并为加拿大的行业创造真正的价值。 近年来，开发新的、更好的低成本和可打印的光电子平台，用于太阳能收集、照明和显示以及传感应用，是一种非同寻常的推动。与此同时，令人振奋的新型可打印材料系统在过去5年中也获得了巨大的发展势头。通过这个战略项目，我们的国际公认的领导者团队致力于(1)开发新的可打印光电材料及其独特性能，(2)调整其标准实验室级工艺，以使用尖端的商业级打印能力，(3)将这些材料集成到新的完全可打印的传感器设备架构中，以及(4)提供完整的、自主的和完全可打印的传感平台。 与Industry 4.0和物联网(IoT)革命相关的对智能网络物理系统的大规模推动，旨在基于更好且容易获得的数据集制定明智的实时决策。对于生物医学、制造业、可穿戴设备或一般消费电子应用，本项目中提出的、由可印刷电子制造(APEM)生产的更好、更便宜的传感器架构显然将成为这一深刻变革的核心。

Exploring new additive manufacturing paradigms is essential for the Canadian economy. Printable flexible hybrid electronics is one of these rapidly-emerging sectors. In addition to help train highly-qualified personnel, build international research collaborations and establish fruitful partnerships with the industry, the long-term impact of this research would be to provide novel low-cost and high-performance printable architectures to use as cost-effective alternatives for a wide-range of sensing applications from wearable electronics to IoT and create real value for Canada's industry. In recent years, there was an extraordinary push to develop new and better low-cost and printable optoelectronic platforms for solar-energy harvesting, lighting & displays and sensing applications. Meanwhile, exciting new printable material systems have also gained tremendous momentum in the last 5 years. With this strategic project, our team of internationally-recognized leaders seeks to (1) exploit new printable optoelectronic materials and their unique properties, (2) adapt their standard laboratory-level processing to use cutting-edge commercial-grade printing capabilities, (3) integrate these materials into new fully-printable sensor device architectures and (4) provide a complete, autonomous and fully-printable sensing platform. The massive push for intelligent cyber-physical systems associated with the Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) revolutions aims at informed real-time decision making based on better and readily-acquired sets of data. For biomedical, manufacturing, wearables or general consumer electronic applications, better and cheaper sensor architectures proposed in this project and produced by additive printable electronic manufacturing (APEM) will obviously be at the core of this profound transformation.