Additive Manufactured Compliant Surface Reflectance Sensor

In this paper1, we present an additive manufacturing (AM) method to implement structural electronics using an off-the-shelf fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer with thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) filament, conductive silver ink, and electronics components in standard packages. As a demonstrator, a surface reflectance sensor has been implemented. The structure consists of several 3D-printed TPU layers, 3D channels for the conductors, and cavities for components. A comparison is made between the performance of a traditional implementation on rigid PCB and the new sensor. The study shows that the chosen approach can be used for AM structural electronics.