Roland Pruckner,
"Towards Myceliotronics: Sutstainable Electronics Based on Fungal Substrates"
, 6-2024
Original Titel:
Towards Myceliotronics: Sutstainable Electronics Based on Fungal Substrates
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Electronic waste is a growing environmental problem that further harbours global health risks.
Due to the irrevocable integration into our daily lives and the short-lived use of products, large quantities of electronic devices are being thrown away at a frightening pace. Advances in portable electronic devices for healthcare and similar applications are driving the production of disposable electronics, creating an additional source of electronic waste. Compared to high performance, high efficiency and low costs, sustainability has been considered a subordinate issue for too long. If the increasing consumption remains inevitable, the only option is to design products entirely with non-toxic, ideally biodegradable materials or to recycle the products properly.
This thesis focuses on the development of materials for sustainable electronic, specifically mycelium-based substrates for flexible printed circuit boards (PCBs) and thin-film electronics.
Initially, the optimal growth conditions for thin but scalable, homogenous mycelium skins are investigated. These skins exhibit high thermal stability and have similar electrical properties to paper substrates. The introducing of common processing techniques such as physical vapor deposition (PVD) enables the production of metallic coatings with high conductivities as high as 9.75 ± 1.44 × 104 S cm?1 that can withstand thousands of bending cycles and multiple folds with only a moderate resistance increase. Mycelium skins are used as separators and housing for novel batteries, utilizing the permeability of the porous mycelium structure. To improve the surface roughness of the material, environmental-friendly chemical treatments are explored, which also improves electrical and mechanical properties without compromising biodegradability and thermal stability. By incorporating biodegradable shellac coatings, the surface is made even smoother, gains moisture resistance, and allows for the retrieval of non-biodegradable parts, fostering a more sustainable method for flexible electronics. In order to demonstrate the versatility of the material for sustainable electronics, we develop a flexible mycelial PCB with a near-field-communication (NFC) tag with a 4.85mH engraved copper coil.
Overall, this thesis contributes to the field of sustainable electronics by introducing mycelium materials as a novel class of flexible substrates with lower environmental impact and a high potential for reducing electronic waste.
Forschungs-