The Development of an Affordable Graphite-Based Conductive Ink for Printed Electronics

Printed electronics (PEs) are rapidly attracting interest, especially in wearable sensors, smart textiles, and IoT devices. Conductive inks, essential for the fabrication of PE, must be highly conductive, cost-effective, biocompatible, easy to prepare, and less viscous. Conductive inks comprise a conducting material (metals like silver, gold, copper, or carbon-based alternatives like graphite, graphene, and carbon nanotubes), a binder, and a solvent. In this work, a water-based graphite conductive ink is developed using graphite as a conductive material, corn starch powder (non-toxic and biodegradable) as a binder, and distilled water as a solvent. Firstly, corn starch powder is added to distilled water, which is heated up to 100 °C and stirred continuously until a homogeneous gel-like mixture is formed. After cooling the mixture, graphite powder is added to it, and it is stirred for an hour at 450 rpm to obtain the ink. To check the conductivity, the ink is brush-painted on a paper substrate with a dimension of 20 mm × 10 mm and the result shows a low ohmic resistance of ~560 Ω, confirming the highly conductive nature of the ink. Additionally, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) is performed on the prepared ink to evaluate its thermal stability, and a very strong X-ray diffraction (XRD) peak obtained at 2θ° = 26.5426° and a small peak at 2θ° = 54.6145°, along with a few other small peaks, confirms the presence of graphite with corn starch. Thus, this conductive ink can be used for PEs owing to its affordability, biocompatibility, and ease of preparation.