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To produce those sensors, Velásquez-García and Taylor used electrospray emitters that had been built using conventional processes. However, in the December issue of the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, Velásquez-García reports using an affordable, high-quality 3-D printer to produce plastic electrospray emitters whose size and performance match those of the emitters that yielded the gas sensors.
Made to order
In addition to making electrospray devices more cost-effective, Velásquez-García says, 3-D printing also makes it easier to customize them for particular applications. “When we started designing them, we didn’t know anything,” Velásquez-García says. “But at the end of the week, we had maybe 15 generations of devices, where each design worked better than the previous versions.”
Indeed, Velásquez-García says, the advantages of electrospray are not so much in enabling existing MEMS devices to be made more cheaply as in enabling wholly new devices. Besides making small-market MEMS products cost-effective, electrospray could enable products incompatible with existing manufacturing techniques.
“In some cases, MEMS manufacturers have to compromise between what they intended to make, based on the models, and what you can make based on the microfabrication techniques,” Velásquez-García says. “Only a few devices that fit into the description of having large markets and not having subpar performance are the ones that have made it.”
Electrospray could also lead to novel biological sensors, Velásquez-García says. “It allows us to deposit materials that would not be compatible with high-temperature semiconductor manufacturing, like biological molecules,” he says.
“For sure, the paper opens new technical paths to making gas microsensors,” says Jan Dziuban, head of the Division of Microengineering at Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland. “From a technical point of view, the process may be easily adapted to mass fabrication.”
“But promising results must be proved statistically,” he cautions. “Personal experience tells me that plenty of very promising materials for new sensors, utilizing nanostructured materials, which have been published in high-level scientific papers, haven't resulted in reliable products.”
