Tunable and facile fabrication of flexible interdigitated capacitors on Butter Paper using solvent-free method

Abstract

Paper is one of the most ubiquitous materials. In the present work, it is employed as a flexible, inexpensive, degradable, lightweight and eco-friendly substrate for solvent-free fabrication of the Inter Digitated Capacitor (IDC). IDCs are employed in many sensing and energy harvesting applications recently, thus it was imperative to find a technique to fabricate IDCs using environment friendly and biodegradable processes. With fixed and controlled parameters, Butter paper exhibits the lowest resistance and maximum capacitance which were almost 1 kΩ and in the range of 20–30 pF respectively. Additionally, maximum capacitance per unit area was achieved through configuring the shape of graphite electrodes and it was observed that semi-circular geometry exhibits maximum capacitance, giving a value of almost 60 pF. Furthermore, the investigation has been made on green fabrication process to get the range of scalability and tune-ability of the capacitance of IDCs by impregnating Butter Papers in NaCl solution and also talking about the saturation point of these solutions, post which the IDCs start behaving erraticaly.The capacitance value in this case shows extrememly positive results and we managed to obtain a value of 18 nF which was a significant jump when compared to the untreated samples, which exhibted capacitance values in the range of pico-farads. Thus, it was discovered that Butter Paper(BP) could potentially function as a feasible and promising choice for flexible electronics.

Keywords

• Pencil
• Paper
• Flexible capacitors
• NaCl salt
• Interdigitated capacitor
• Graphite