Roll-to-Roll Gravure Printing of Electric Heaters on Polymeric Substrates

We have developed a roll-to-roll (R2R) processing system with gravure printing & coating functions for manufacturing printed electronic devices on flexible substrates. The R2R processing system is equipped with a gravure printing module, a coating module and a lamination module, several devices have been fabricated with pilot production volume. In this paper, we will report our achievement of using the R2R processing system to manufacturing micro heaters with low cost and high throughput. The heaters can be printed on either PET or TPU films or transferred from TPU films to fabrics for different applications such as heating for seats, shoes as well as winter vest; about 80 °C has been achieved when a 4V power source is used.