The chemists Prof. Dr. Martin Steinhart (Osnabrück University) and Prof. Dr. Longjian Xue (Wuhan University) have invented a so-called capillary nanostamping process. A European patent has now been granted for it.
According to the state of the art, stamping material on surfaces suffers from the fact that no ink can be replenished during successive stamping cycles and the quality of the patterns produced in this way becomes increasingly poor. The invention of the innovative stamping process was inspired by the ability of insects to walk up walls.
Many insects have fields of tiny hairs on their feet that allow them to stick to rough surfaces. Liquids are also separated through pores in the hairs. When the insects detach their feet from a surface, tiny droplets remain on these fields. This principle is technically exploited by capillary nano-printing. For this purpose, stamps with sponge-like pore systems are used, the pore diameter of which is typically in the nanometer range. A wide range of aqueous and non-aqueous inks can be filled into these pore systems, enabling many successive stamping processes without exhausting the ink supply. Applications can be seen in medical technology or thin-film technology for the production of structured thin layers of functional materials, which could be easily integrated into device architectures in this way.
