Conductive paint/ink

Aug 28, 2017 6 Replies

Around 1:10 in this video you can see someone using the paint/ink/whatever to what looks like route interconnects on blob board:


I was always under the impression that the resistance of these conductive inks was usually too high to use to draw thin "traces" like that and have them work very well.


As long as there is not much current it should be fine. I could stick 10k ohms into lots of nodes on a circiut and still have it work. I think sometime we dug up the sheet resistance of this stuff... so you could work it out.

George H.

I have some. At 50 micron film thickness, it is 55 ohms/square . The data sheet and app note are available at the Web site.

Thanks, 10 mil width for an inch or two is ~1k ohm. I still can't see a use for the stuff. (tapered pot?)

George H.

I used a similar stuff a few times some 15-20 years ago. The conductive ingredient seemed to be carbon, not metal. It worked for repairing copper tracks that don't need to be highly conductive, such as in remote controls and game pads.

The product was cheap - less than $1 for a 5ml bottle IIRC. The adhesive component wasn't good and didn't stand up well to flexing.

That reminds of a time >40 years ago when I experimented with adding carbon power to two-part epoxy glue. It worked but I don't remember how well.

IIRC you need to add a lot. I expect silicone & carbon would work for flexible apps.

NT

Conductive paints have been around for over 70 years. Carbon-based versions seem to have the highest resistivity, and nickel-carbonyl versions (aquadag) number two. Silver-base paints are the best, but were always expensive even 40 (or so) years ago. Second-best on conductivity are the copper-based paints.

These last two can give reasonable and useful results when some care is applied.

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