Oct 26, 2026 · 19 min · 9 segments
New and ambitious ideas lay the foundation for the next generation of technologies. NSF-supported researcher Ethan Secor discusses a specialized additive manufacturing technique, the materials…
Ethan SecorGuestNate PotkerHost
I'd say probably the most direct answer is that when I started grad school, the professor I really wanted to work with had an open project in essentially electronics.
I was not thinking about looking for that, but now that was 14 years ago now, and the reason I'm still working on pretty electron, which was...
I can be working with chemists, chemical engineers, material scientists, electrical engineers, and thermal engineers.
I think the general audience is used to maybe 3D printers at home, maybe a laser jet printer, maybe an inkjet printer that kind of is approaching these techniques that you're working with.
So what is, I guess, an aerosol jet printer and how does it work with electronics?
So if you think of like an airbrush or spray painting, it's similar in terms of depositing droplets onto a surface by pushing them along with a gas flow.
Where we're different from that is rather than spraying out and covering a large area with paint, we focus that droplet stream down to a very fine precision.
So we're talking about, you know, sub-100 micron light lines down to 20 microns.
So human hair is on the order of 100 microns in width, so that kind of length scale.
In comparison to spray painting where you're putting down a colored material, we're of course working with electronically functional materials.
So rather than a red or a blue ink, we might have a conductive ink and a dielectric ink and being able to choose between those how we pattern a device so that now we're printing circuits rather than pictures.
I'd say probably the most direct answer is that when I started grad school, the professor I really wanted to work with had an open project in essentially electronics.
I was not thinking about looking for that, but now that was 14 years ago now, and the reason I'm still working on pretty electron, which was...
I can be working with chemists, chemical engineers, material scientists, electrical engineers, and thermal engineers.
I think the general audience is used to maybe 3D printers at home, maybe a laser jet printer, maybe an inkjet printer that kind of is approaching these techniques that you're working with.
So what is, I guess, an aerosol jet printer and how does it work with electronics?
So if you think of like an airbrush or spray painting, it's similar in terms of depositing droplets onto a surface by pushing them along with a gas flow.
Where we're different from that is rather than spraying out and covering a large area with paint, we focus that droplet stream down to a very fine precision.
So we're talking about, you know, sub-100 micron light lines down to 20 microns.
So human hair is on the order of 100 microns in width, so that kind of length scale.
In comparison to spray painting where you're putting down a colored material, we're of course working with electronically functional materials.
So rather than a red or a blue ink, we might have a conductive ink and a dielectric ink and being able to choose between those how we pattern a device so that now we're printing circuits rather than pictures.
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