Plans begin decades in advance for a tremendous effort such as the first manned mission to Mars. The details are as fine – and essential – as how astronauts will breathe and eat and track their health.
“There’s no doubt that the transportation is taken care of. The spacecraft will be developed,” says Ram Gandhiraman, a scientist with Universities Space Research Association at NASA Ames Research Center.
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Ref: Plasma jet printing for flexible substrates. Applied Physics Letters (22 March 2016) | DOI: 10.1063/1.4943792
ABSTRACT
Recent interest in flexible electronics and wearable devices has created a demand for fast and highly repeatable printing processes suitable for device manufacturing. Robust printing technology is critical for the integration of sensors and other devices on flexible substrates such as paper and textile. An atmospheric pressure plasma-based printing process has been developed to deposit different types of nanomaterials on flexible substrates. Multiwalled carbon nanotubes were deposited on paper to demonstrate site-selective deposition as well as direct printing without any type of patterning. Plasma-printed nanotubes were compared with non-plasma-printed samples under similar gas flow and other experimental conditions and found to be denser with higher conductivity. The utility of the nanotubes on the paper substrate as a biosensor and chemical sensor was demonstrated by the detection of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, and ammonia, respectively.