Gravure printing for thin film ceramics manufacturing from nanoparticles

Printing technologies can offer high potential for the thin film deposition of functional materials. Among the printing techniques, the gravure is considered one of the most promising, although to date it is still little employed, especially for the inorganic functional materials. In this work, the study of the gravure printing process for the metal oxides thin film production on flexible polymer substrate is reported. For this purpose, zinc oxide (ZnO) was chosen due to its versatile properties and nanosize effects, which make it suitable for many high technology areas. The gravure printing was made using low viscosity inks of ZnO nanoparticles. The characteristics of the printed thin films were examined and discussed. Thanks to the understanding of the physics underlying the film forming during the printing process combined to the knowledge on such specific material, uniform, compact, very transparent and smooth films were obtained in different nanometric thicknesses. Moreover, the possibility of fabricating ceramic nanocomposite films directly through this printing technique is also presented. Thanks to its scientific approach, this work makes available to the world of ceramics an industrial versatile and low-cost production technique which can allow to study and develop high-quality thin film ceramics with technologically interesting properties as well as nanoparticles behavior and their treatments in order to develop and use their fascinating nanosize properties.