Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 2D-INK (Redesigning 2D Materials for the Formulation of Semiconducting Inks)
Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-12-31
In spite of the remarkable scientific progress in the preparation of inks of 2D materials, these are still not widely used by the industry in significant quantities. The high price of commercially available inks is an effect of the lack of processability of these materials, which impedes their implementation in large area electronics. 2D-INK is a European project targeted at developing inks of novel 2D semiconducting materials for low-cost large-area fabrication processes on insulating substrates through a new methodology, which will exceed the properties of state-of-the-art graphene- and graphene oxide based inks.
Several routes for the synthesis of precursors for 2D Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) have been developed. The synthesis of several COFs for reference purposes have been synthesised and characterised. We have improved substantially the current synthetic protocol for the synthesis COFs and carried out calculations in order to understand the factors that control their properties. In addition a new experimental set up for characterizing COFs by Raman spectroscopy has been developed.
2D-INK is working on establishing Proof-of-Principle of the technological possibilities of COF-based inks that will exceed the current limits in terms of loading and stability of state-of-the-art graphene-based inks. Achieving this would represent an important step forward in the processing of 2D semiconducting materials and will provide the key parameters for fabricating the next generation of ultrathin electronic appliances and exploring their potential over other scientific and technological disciplines, such as sensing, photonics, energy storage and conversion, spintronics, etc.