Preliminary Results on Carbon-Based Thermistors Produced by Aerosol Jet Printing

Electronics became pervasive in the production sites generating the now-occurring fourth industrial revolution. In this paradigm, different information technologies are employed in order to achieve better control over the overall production process and better plan each maintenance intervention. In the monitoring processes, different physical quantities are constantly monitored with sensors connected to the acquisition electronics and therefore to the communication network. Among those, temperature sensors are relevant since they can provide a set of information useful to track the production process and the workers’ wellbeing, and to compensate for the output of other sensors. Thus, in this work, the behavior of a carbon-based ink on different substrates was evaluated to produce thermistors. The devices were evaluated using both an oven and a climatic chamber and both positive (PTC) and negative (NTC) temperature coefficients were observed. The devices resulted promising with sensitivities comparable with the ones of standard Pt100 sensors in selected parts of the temperature measurement range.