Traditional paper and papermaking have struggled with a declining market during the last few decades.

Coated paper substrates were custom-designed and shown to assist low-temperature sintering of inkjet-printed silver films. A built-in active sintering agent induced room-temperature sintering.

In this article, a modified design of an RF Radio Frequency Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) tag, used as a sensor platform, is manufactured and characterized. EAS tags are passive devices consisting of a capacitor and coil, tuned to a resonance frequency readable by the detector equipment, in this case 8.2 MHz. They were originally used to detect whether merchandise was being moved through the detection gates at shop exits, in which case an alarm was triggered. If the capacitance is divided in two and a resistive sensor device inserted in between, the resonant Inductor-Capacitor (LC) circuit becomes an Inductor-Capacitor-Capacitor-Resistor LCCR circuit and can be used as a sensor tag. A high sensor resistance means that one capacitor is decoupled, leading to one resonance frequency, while a low resistance will couple both capacitances into the circuit, resulting in a lower resonance frequency. Different types of resistive sensors exist that are able to detect properties such as pressure, moisture, light and temperature. The tag is manufactured in Aluminum foil on a polyetylentereftalat (PET) substrate, resulting in a cost effective RF-platform for various resistive sensors. Two types of tags are designed and manufactured, one with parallel plate capacitors and the other with interdigital capacitors. To test the tags, a resistive tilt sensor is mounted and the tags are characterized using a network analyzer. It is shown that for high resistance, the tags have a resonance frequency of morethan 10 MHz while for low values the frequency approaches 8.2 MHz.

Electrically conductive films are key components in most printed and flexible electronics applications. For the solution processing of conductive films, inks containing silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) remain important because of their relatively easy processing and generally low resistivity after a sintering procedure. Because the commonly used, moderate sintering temperatures of 150–300 °C are still too high for most low-cost flexible substrates, expanding the knowledge of surface-ink interactions that affect the sintering temperature is desirable. It is known that chloride ions can assist the sintering of AgNP films by displacing capping agents on the surfaces of AgNPs. However, very little is known about other possible Cl-AgNP interactions that affect the resistivity and no interaction having the opposite effect (sintering inhibition) has been identified before. Here we identify such a Cl-AgNP interaction giving sintering inhibition and find that the mechanism involves the formation of AgCl nanocrystals within the AgNP film. The AgCl formation was observed after inkjet-printing of AgNP inks with polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as the capping agent onto papers with quick-absorbing coatings containing 0.3 wt % KCl. Our findings show that chloride can have opposite roles during sintering, either assisting or inhibiting the sintering depending on the prevalence of AgCl formation. The prevalence of AgCl formation depends on the absorption properties and the capping agent.