1. Sustainable roll-to-roll manufactured multi-layer smart label
- Author
-
Victor Thenot, Gael Depres, Romain Futsch, Aline Rougier, Elina Jansson, Maria Smolander, Liisa Hakola, Tuomas Happonen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), Institut de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Bordeaux (ICMCB), Université de Bordeaux (UB)-Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux-Institut de Chimie du CNRS (INC)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), ArjoWiggins France, and Research leading to this paper was carried out in Supersmart research project [52] that has received funding from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, under the Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The project demonstrators were awarded the ‘Best Publicly Funded Project Demonstrator’ at OE-A Competition 2021.
- Subjects
Computer science ,02 engineering and technology ,Substrate (printing) ,010402 general chemistry ,01 natural sciences ,7. Clean energy ,Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering ,Near field communication ,Roll-to-roll processing ,Switching time ,Rectification ,[SPI.GPROC]Engineering Sciences [physics]/Chemical and Process Engineering ,Electronics ,Electrochromic display ,business.industry ,Anti-counterfeiting ,Mechanical Engineering ,Electrical engineering ,Printed electronics ,[CHIM.MATE]Chemical Sciences/Material chemistry ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,0104 chemical sciences ,Computer Science Applications ,[SPI.TRON]Engineering Sciences [physics]/Electronics ,Sustainability ,Control and Systems Engineering ,Mobile phone ,Electrochromism ,0210 nano-technology ,business ,Software - Abstract
Sustainability in electronics has a growing importance due to, e.g. increasing electronic waste, and global and European sustainability goals. Printing technologies and use of paper as a substrate enable manufacturing of sustainable electronic devices for emerging applications, such as the multi-layer anti-counterfeit label presented in this paper. This device consisted of electrochromic display (ECD) element, NFC (near field communication) tag and circuitry, all fully roll-to-roll (R2R) printed and assembled on plastic-free paper substrate, thus leading to a sustainable and recyclable device. Our setup uses harvested energy from HF field of a smartphone or reader, to switch an electrochromic display after rectification to prove authenticity of a product. Our novelty is in upscaling the manufacturing process to be fully printable and R2R processable in high-throughput conditions simulating industrial environment, i.e. in pilot scale. The printing workflow consisted of 11 R2R printed layers, all done in sufficient quality and registration. The printed antennas showed sheet resistance values of 32.9±1.9 mΩ/sq. The final yield was almost 1500 fully printed devices, and in R2R assembly over 1400 labels were integrated with 96.5% yield. All the assembled tags were readable with mobile phone NFC reader. The optical contrast (ΔE*) measured for the ECDs was over 15 for all the printed displays, a progressive switching time with a colour change visible in less than 5 s. The smart tag is ITO-free, plastic-free, fully printed in R2R and has a good stability over 50 cycles and reversible colour change from light to dark blue.
- Published
- 2021