(257l) Fabrication of Patterned Metal Oxide Thin Film By Using a Combination of Microreactor and PDMS Microchannels

Microreactor-Assisted Nanomaterial Synthesis and Deposition (MANS&D) process combines the merits of microreaction technology and solution phase synthesis of nanomaterials. This technique uses continuous flow microreactors for the synthesis, assembly and deposition of nanomaterials. In synthesis, microreactor technology offers large surface-area-to-volume ratios within microchannel structures to accelerate heat and mass transport, which allows for synthesizing nanomaterials with various size and structures. To fabricating patterned thin films, MANS&D process was combined with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic channels. In this study, ZnO and CuO nanostructure thin films were fabricated, and the process can be expanded to other patterned nanostructure thin films. The scaling up of these patterned nanostructured films was achieved by numbering-up the microchannel unit operations in parallel, allowing for the fabrication of these patterned films at various scales. This patterned structures can be potentially applied in solar cells, sensors, and thin film transistors.