Tech Talk E17: Heat Shield to Protect Spaceships, Material as Hard as Diamond, Screen Printing Electronics

We’re warming things up today on LA NPDT Tech Talk, where we bring you the latest developments in science and technology and keep you tuned in the newest gadgets and product innovations across the globe.

A team of researchers from Florida State University is developing a design for a heat shield that better protects spaceships, rockets, and jet aircraft. As flight systems become faster, they need better heat shields to protect them. Researchers used sheets of carbon nanotubes in the shape of a cylinder to build the heat shield. The material, known as buckypaper, was soaked in a resin of phenol to create lightweight, flexible material that is durable enough to potentially protect the body of a rocket or jet. This thin shield protects and supports the body of the rocket. Early tests show that the buckypaper shields are better at dispersing the heat than today’s control shields. While this is good news for the space program, additional research and testing is being done to confirm these findings.

Brown School of Engineering researchers and their colleagues are testing theoretical structures of cross linked carbon nanotubes that they believe to be extremely strong. They 3D printed these polymer blocks and tested them to see this extraordinary strength. The result? They deflected bullets and withstood crushing forces up to 10 times better than a solid block of the material. The lab tests showed how the porous polymer lattice let the blocks collapse in without cracking, essentially “catching” the bullet. The material, almost as hard as diamonds, could lead to new safety features for law enforcement, the military, and other EMS services.

Researchers have shown that it is possible to print large scale integrated circuits in a printing press. The researchers, from Linkoping University and RISE, Campus Norrkoping, have shown that we can print circuits with more than 100 organic electrochemical transistors. By using a precise screen printer and the right material, they have been able to print circuits that can be used to power an electrochromic display or other parts of the world that the internet of things brings to reality.

Screen-printed integrated circuits are a research headline, but the underlying shift is practical: printed electronics manufacturing turns conductive inks and thin flexible substrates into functional circuits using processes borrowed from graphics printing rather than from silicon fabs. For a product team, that changes where sensing and interface electronics can live — inside a curved housing, laminated behind a membrane, or printed directly onto packaging that ships by the million.

The trade is performance for form and cost. Printed transistors switch far slower than silicon and carry less current, so they will not run a processor. They are well suited to low-frequency roles: capacitive touch layers, antennas, heaters, electrochromic displays, moisture and strain sensors, and simple logic close to the sensor. In most designs the printed layer feeds a conventional silicon controller on a small rigid board.

Advanced materials news — heat shields, superhard carbon, printed circuits — usually reaches products through this path: a lab proves a property, a process engineer finds a way to deposit it repeatably, and a product team decides whether the new capability removes a part, a step or a failure mode. If it does not do one of those three things, it stays a paper. That filter is worth applying to every material announcement you read.

Choosing materials and processes together is core product design work, and it is where an early prototype pays for itself. If you are weighing a new material or a printed sensor layer for a product in development, our rapid prototyping team can build the test coupon before you commit to tooling.

Researchers at Florida State University are developing heat shields using sheets of carbon nanotubes. These nanotubes, known as buckypaper, are soaked in a phenol resin. The resulting material is lightweight, flexible, and durable. Early tests indicate these buckypaper shields disperse heat better than current control shields, offering improved protection for spaceships, rockets, and jet aircraft.

Brown School of Engineering researchers and colleagues are testing cross-linked carbon nanotube structures. They 3D printed polymer blocks, which deflected bullets and withstood crushing forces 10 times better than solid material blocks. This porous polymer lattice collapses without cracking, effectively 'catching' bullets. The material, almost as hard as diamonds, could enhance safety features for law enforcement, military, and EMS services.

Researchers from Linkoping University and RISE, Campus Norrkoping, have demonstrated printing large-scale integrated circuits using a printing press. They have printed circuits containing over 100 organic electrochemical transistors. By utilizing a precise screen printer and appropriate materials, these circuits can power electrochromic displays or other Internet of Things components. This method allows for the production of circuits in a printing press.

Buckypaper heat shields are designed to protect spaceships, rockets, and jet aircraft. They are made from carbon nanotubes soaked in phenol resin, creating a lightweight, flexible, and durable material. Early tests show these shields are better at dispersing heat compared to current control shields. This thin shield protects and supports the body of a rocket, allowing for potentially faster flight systems.

Printed electronics manufacturing spans several processes with very different economics. Screen printing dominates today for volume and robustness; inkjet and aerosol jet win where the pattern changes often or the substrate is awkward. Choosing on volume and pattern stability, rather than novelty, avoids expensive experimentation.

Whatever the process, qualify the substrate and the cure step together. Most printed electronics failures trace to adhesion or to a cure profile the substrate cannot tolerate, not to the conductive ink itself.

Heat shields that outperform ceramics, coatings as hard as diamond and circuits printed directly onto fabric all begin the same way: a paper demonstrating a property under controlled conditions. What determines whether the property becomes a product is availability at commercial quantity, behaviour after aging, and whether a supplier will guarantee lot-to-lot consistency. Most materials that make headlines never clear those three hurdles, and the ones that do usually take a decade.

For a product team, the practical skill is reading a material claim and finding the omitted conditions. A hardness figure without a test method is decorative. A thermal rating without a duration is meaningless — surviving 1,500 °C for four seconds and for four hours are different materials. A printed conductor's resistance matters far less than how that resistance drifts after five hundred flex cycles and a humidity soak.

Printed electronics are genuinely production-ready for a narrow set of functions: membrane switches, capacitive touch overlays, heaters, antennas, and simple sensor traces. They are not ready to replace a populated circuit board with fine-pitch silicon. The value is not lower cost per circuit — it is the ability to put a conductive layer on a curved, thin or flexible surface where a rigid board cannot go.

Design constraints follow from the substrate. Silver inks are the reliable choice and the expensive one; carbon inks are cheap and far more resistive. Trace geometry must tolerate ink spread, and every crossover needs a printed dielectric layer that adds a process step. Interconnection to the rigid world — the crimp, the ZIF connector, the anisotropic conductive film bond — is where most printed assemblies fail in the field, so it deserves the majority of your test budget.

These decisions belong with the electronics architecture rather than with industrial design, which is why we handle them inside electronic design services and validate them against the manufacturing plan during production planning.

How long does a new material take to reach production? Typically five to fifteen years from first publication to a qualified commercial grade with multiple suppliers. Products that depend on a single-source research material carry existential supply risk.

Can I design around a material that is not yet commercially available? Only with a conventional fallback in the same envelope. Otherwise a supplier decision you do not control determines whether your product exists.

Are printed electronics cheaper than a flex PCB? Not usually at low volume. Printed circuits win on form factor and on very high volume with simple geometry; a conventional flex circuit wins on density and on repeatable quality.

What is the most common failure in flexible electronics? The interconnect between the flexible circuit and the rigid board. Design it as a serviceable, testable joint and cycle-test it aggressively — a pattern visible across projects in our portfolio.