Biodegradable…Electronics?!?

Teams of scientists led by the University of Chicago are leveraging precision growth to convert plants into biodegradable electronic devices. The process allows researchers to extract plant components and convert them into bio-based inks. Watch this video to learn more.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] our appetite for electronics is growing we are becoming more and more addicted to our devices but the question becomes what happens when we are done with them currently all the electronic devices are mostly sanary manufactured which means this type of manufacturing will be susceptible to interruption or disruption of the supply chain and the

00:00:28 other uh challenge is you know all this electronic devices are generating our waste to our society and damaging our environment we are starting to think that maybe we should have to rethink that do we need all this fancy electronics that are not degradable at all for everything that we do so made public is a future manufacturing team focused around the idea of developing

00:00:53 new Greener methods of obtaining electronic devices uh predominantly from plants so we are starting with raw materials that go into the sensor these raw materials are from biomass and then we're able to uh degrade the sensor and recover the components of it to be used again we are hoping to be able to demonstrate a manufacturing Paradigm that allows us to convert plant into

00:01:19 biobased inks to print electronic devices we further would like to democratize this manufacturing of electronic devices by enabling individuals to print their devices from home or in nearby library I think that all research starts with an idea which seems farfetched growing Electronics from Plants seems farfetched but more we dug into it we see the possibilities

00:01:47 many of the steps can now be done showing up in research literatures our colleagues have made some of this possible already so the question was why not put it together from starting source of the plant and all the way to the printed Electronics we have a fairly large team of experts from five institutions University of Chicago is the lead we

00:02:09 also have partnership with Northwestern University University of Illinois Chicago University of Illinois Alana Champagne and AWA State University and argon plays a big role in all this we maintain the data in argon we have strong effort in roll-to-roll manufacturing in argon National Lab so we become this convening ground for this large set of collaboration where we can

00:02:32 get together and provide our input and feedback and our expertise to this team the made public project is really an example of convergent research we needed all types of expertise in this project from people who understand plant biology to people who understand the material science of using these different inks to those who can do the 3D printing itself we also are bringing in team members who

00:02:56 have expertise in machine learning because we want to design these processes and these sensors in the most efficient way possible if you're going to make this to scale you really have to go well beyond what a single lab can do nowadays I think this is a direction science and engineering has been going for a while the building we're sitting in right now is a molecular engineering

00:03:16 building which was designed here at us Chicago to house not only Engineers but chemists and physicists and biologists and really look at what's happening at the interface of the disciplines I think that's where a lot of the cool stuff actually is going on right now and that's what excites me the general public uh will have access to all these different sensor designs that they can

00:03:37 then print one application we're particularly excited about is urban gardening so if there are Urban gardeners looking to address food deserts in cities they might be able to use made public to print sensors that can help them monitor the components in the soil that comes from their compost piles that they're using to grow their food so we believe that our research

00:03:57 although we are targeting simpler devices and heat sensor photo sensors nutrient sensors that kind of electronics we want to print first as our Target but once you can do what we are trying to do the door is wide open for high value products Custom Electronics which are based on this material right now printing is really for Passive objects but going to the

00:04:20 Future it's going to be expanded to print almost everything we need in our life including our houses airplanes Etc so that's really exciting opportunity we wanted to make our uh students the Next Generation Workforce think about this way think about Manufacturing in this fashion this Eco manufacturing this circular manufacturing concept to really uh protect our environment and enable

00:04:47 the advancement of our society