Imagine charging your cellphone when you’re miles from a plug point. Imagine your milk carton telling you when the contents have turned sour. Imagine the label on a pharmaceutical product measuring the level of noxious gases in the air.
All these things are now possible, thanks to groundbreaking work by professors Margit Härting and David Britton, two award-winning scientists based at the University of Cape Town (UCT). “We’re changing the world of electronics,” says Britton.
Härting explains their achievement in simple terms: they have found a way to produce electronic ink from tiny silicon particles — nanoparticles, to be precise (one thousand millionth of a metre).
With this ink they can print electronic devices on any surface — using screen-printing, as with posters and T-shirts. Britton says these printed electronics have potentially unlimited uses — from animated billboards to smart fabrics.
‘When the particles are printed they form a continuous network, which allows an electric charge to move through it, like in a massive semiconductor crystal,” he says. Until now, scientists had assumed that silicon particles could not be combined to form bulk semiconductor material without undergoing a heating process.
Heat was necessary to stabilise the nanoparticles, which would normally react with the oxygen in the air and become unusable. But Härting and Britton have proved otherwise: their nanoparticle ink was stable at room temperature for two years.
Last month Härting and Britton won the prestigious IDTechEx Academic Research and Development award in recognition of their discovery, beating a number of other applicants from world-renowned universities. The awards ceremony took place in Dresden, Germany, during the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe conference.
‘In the field of printed electronics IDTechEx is not just a consultancy company; they are playing a very big role in driving the commercialisation of printed electronics. Their conference is probably the number one in the world,” says Britton. ‘We’re the only people working on this and now they’ve recognised that we at UCT are world leaders in the field,” he says.
Härting says the award was ‘the result of seven years of hard work by ourselves and our students”. Born and raised in Germany, she says she has loved ‘technical stuff” ever since she was a child.
‘I became an engineer, but I later realised that I needed to get a deeper insight into things, so I decided to study physics. I am excited about how the world works and how I can use this knowledge to make the lives of people better.”
‘I can’t remember not being interested in physics,” says Britton. ‘I used to do a lot of homemade science — kitchen-sink experiments. I’ve always loved hands-on science and applying what I know to the real world.”
Härting and Britton have filed seven international patents and published five peer-reviewed scientific papers in the past four years on their new technology. The next step is to turn their research into marketable products, so they are in the process of establishing a company for this purpose.
They can’t say what is in the pipeline, but they expect that the first product using their technology will be on the market in about a year’s time. So it might not be too long before your shirt is telling you it’s time to shower, or you’re customising your daily newspaper on a screen in the palm of your hand.