PEDOT, aka Magic Water

Screen printed PEDOT is a nearly clear conductive polymer. An interesting feature of the screen printed version of PEDOT…it is almost all water.

Screen printed PEDOT is 97% solvents and 3% solids. Most of the material that gets printed onto the substrate evaporates during the drying process and goes out the stacks of the oven. Further, water makes up the bulk of the solvent. This results in a typical dry ink thickness of 300 nanometers. That’s thin….really thin.

For those who forgot their SI unit prefixes (International System Units) from 8th grade, nano (n) is one billionth, 10^-9 or 0.000000001 and comes from the Greek word νᾶνος (Latin nanus) which means dwarf.

Wikipedia listed these two factoids on just how small nano is:

• One nanometer is about the length that a fingernail grows in one second.
• If a toy marble were scaled down to one nanometer wide, Earth would scale to about one meter (3.3 feet) wide.

Another weird thing about it is it’s bulk color. It’s an amazingly deep black blue purple color. Watching it mix can be mesmerizing. Next time you paint your car, see if they offer bulk PEDOT.

Like many tiny things, PEDOT can be mighty…mighty cool because it conducts electricity and you can see through it. Xymox uses screen printed PEDOT for backlit capacitive sensors.