Engineering and Technology
The emerging field of printed electronics uses large amounts of printing and coating solvents
during fabrication, which commonly are deposited and evaporated within spaces available to
workers. It is in this context unfortunate that many of the currently employed solvents are
non-desirable from health, safety, or environmental perspectives. Here, we address this issue
through the development of a tool for the straightforward identification of functional and
“green” replacement solvents. In short, the tool organizes a large set of solvents according to
their Hansen solubility parameters, ink properties, and sustainability descriptors, and through
systematic iteration delivers suggestions for green alternative solvents with similar dissolution
capacity as the current non-sustainable solvent. We exemplify the merit of the tool in a
case study on a multi-solute ink for high-performance light-emitting electrochemical cells,
where a non-desired solvent was successfully replaced by two benign alternatives. The
green-solvent selection tool is freely available at: www.opeg-umu.se/green-solvent-tool.The Organic Photonics and Electronics Group, Department of Physics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24761-x
Courtesy: https://www.nature.com
Copyright: doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24761-x © The Author(s) 2021
