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Australian startup Syenta has developed a 3D printer capable of printing highly complex and functional electronics like photovoltaics, batteries, sensors and more, promising to do it faster, cheaper and using less energy.
Syenta, a spin-off of the Australian National University (ANU), has just secured $2.46 million in seed funding to help deliver its electronic 3D printers to its first customers. After working on the product for the past three years, co-founder and CEO Jekaterina Viktorova tells pv magazine Australia that the startup will soon be seeking feedback on its initial printer, which can build electronic prototypes.
“We call it an electronic printer, but its actually a multi-material 3D printer. You can literally do whatever you want,” says Ben Wilkinson, Syentas director of research and development.
Syenta prints electrochemically, using a purely additive method. This approach has the potential to reshape manufacturing costs because of its simplicity, but also because the printer uses what are essentially precursor materials. That is, if someone wants to print with copper, the "ink" would actually be copper sulfate. “Our method converts the raw material to copper as we print it,” explains Wilkinson.
“The other really cool thing is that our process can work in reverse. We use a voltage to convert copper, for example, to copper sulfate, which becomes new ink that we can reuse,” he adds. “We are getting much closer to biology, where all resources can be reused and everything is circular.”
For Viktorova, thats the beauty of electrochemistry. “It is reversible and very efficient compared to other methods.”
This approach removes many of the process layers associated with traditional manufacturing, thereby reducing the amount of energy and materials used in the production of electronic products. It also frees technologies from their supply chains, which in the renewable energy sector is becoming increasingly valuable.
The other side of the proposition is what 3D printed electronics itself can offer to sectors such as solar energy and battery storage. “We can do much more sophisticated designs and more complex geometries that improve the performance of batteries and solar power, as well as reduce costs,” says Wilkinson.
“The geometry of these two technologies (solar and batteries) largely determines their performance. What physical distance do ions in batteries have to travel to charge or discharge? Or, in solar cells, what is the resistance of the electrons moving through the solar cell? If we can get it really, really down to the nanoscale, we can drastically reduce that resistance or the charge time.”
Potential applications aside, Syentas current printer - which focuses on allowing its customers to build technological prototypes - fits on a desktop. “The next step is to launch the product on the market,” says Viktorova. “In fact, we are looking for people who are willing to prototype our technology to serve as the foundation for our future product creation activity, which will be the product that ends up on our website and ships around the world.”
Over time, the company aspires to manufacture electronic products on a large scale. “We believe we can improve many of the stages of manufacturing electronics,” says Wilkinson.
"The potential of our technology is really high in terms of the speed it can reach, but at the moment the way we do it is quite slow," he adds. “It is focused on prototyping, but we believe we can manufacture at scale and the process is well suited for it, although there is still a lot of engineering work to be done to develop that capability.”
To date, the vision of scalable additive manufacturing from 3D printing remains unfulfilled.
The Syenta Story
The core of Syentas technology began with a late-night email between Viktorova and her then-PhD supervisor, now co-founder, Professor Luke Connal. The next day, in the ANU laboratory, Viktorova began to experiment.
Although several academics had tried a similar method before, Viktorova says no one had ever done it quite the same way, and perhaps more importantly, her PhD allowed her to spend years refining and testing it until she got it right.
“The timing and mix of capabilities came in handy for us to move to the next phase of commercialization,” he adds.
Syenta, which recently changed its name to Spark3D, is now separate from ANU, although it continues to work closely with the university.
Additive printing based on electrochemistry
To explain how the startup works, Wilkinson recalls the chrome hubcaps on luxury cars. That chroming, he says, is a form of electroplating. “What we do differently is that we dont have to use chrome, we can use a lot of different materials and we print in a very small area. We can make complex patterns with this type of material plating.”
As for the “additive” component, it refers to an approach consisting of adding only materials. It is different from most manufacturing processes, which add and subtract materials.
“I think its a unique value proposition in itself,” says Viktorova, referring to the additive approach. "Theres not that much literal waste."
Syentas current printer prints mostly metals, such as copper and silver, although it can also print gold and nickel. Substrates for testing are 5 cm x 5 cm, with a print area of ??30 cm x 30 cm.
The printer can make a single-layer PCB “in minutes,” says Viktorova, “unlike other technologies that have been developed that take hours to do.”
Solar manufacturing potential
Wilkinson points to silicon solar cells and microchips as interesting ways to think about Syentas approach. Silicon microchips require high resolution, such as very complex patterns in a small space, while silicon solar cells require much less detail, making them “low resolution”, but are fabricated over much larger areas.
“The potential of our technology is to be able to do both at the same time, that is, to have the complexity of nanoscale resolution at the speed and on the surface of solar cells,” says Wilkinson.
Viktrova adds that the technology has “a rather interesting relationship between manufacturing precision and speed: its quite linear, which is unique. So we believe that there is a unique scalability, even in our prototyping product, that is intrinsic to the technology itself.”
Viktorova describes solar as a particularly interesting market for Syenta due to the similarity of the setup: “They just use a different technology [to manufacture], usually additive in combination with subtractive. So were very interested in saving this extra step for somebody."
Environmental impact
Making more things often means more pollution. But Wilkinson claims that, according to the range-of-emissions equation, the printers range-one emissions are nothing: in the ANU, at least, the printer runs on renewable electricity.
As for scope two, the additive approach of the printer means that no more materials are used than are absolutely necessary. What gets deposited gets deposited well and fast and in a way thats recyclable, which means that each finished printed product has the least embodied energy possible for its production, he says.
And beyond these realms, Wilkinson says, the printer offers people the chance to make better, cheaper devices that can increase adoption of renewable technology, whether its batteries, solar power, smart devices, or ways to connect to the Internet of things. “If its really cheap, more people adopt it,” Wilkinson says.
The reversibility component of the technology is especially important for the startup. “We are building towards being able to recycle what we print on the same product in the same system,” says Viktorova.
Large-Scale Manufacturing
In terms of the big picture, the Syenta team believes their technology holds great promise for large-scale electronics manufacturing, and Wilkinson says he believes "most" electronics manufacturing could be done Better with your method.
According to Viktorova, electronics manufacturing is mainly concentrated in Europe, and Syenta expects to delve into and learn from this rich ecosystem in the short term.
“We would like to make a product that would fit into existing supply chains or existing production lines, be faster and cheaper, and offer the benefits of pattern resolution,” says Wilkinson. "Im sure it will happen, but it takes time and effort to get it done."
It will also require a fair amount of resources and funding, something the team is not missing. Based on the recent seed capital raising, Viktorova says the company will seek financing for the next phases of commercialization in 2023. |
