Haydale’s unique functional inks provide performance enhancements and cost reductions. Our conductive & piezoresistive products offer a unique blend of nanomaterial enhanced and silver inks.
Printing using conductive inks based on graphene formulations opens up major technical innovation and commercial opportunities in electronics, sensors, optical systems and many others. We have built a strong and close association with the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating (WCPC) which gives us access to world class research in the fundamental science of printing and formulation as well as inks and coatings. Together with WCPC and the National Physical Laboratory, we are undertaking ground breaking work on the chemistry of the surface functionalisation of graphene and other nano materials. This will drive further improvements to our HDPlas® process and enable us to fine tune material performance and develop new nanomaterial enhanced materials – truly creating material change.
RFID
Using our expertise, we are co-developing both graphene and silver-based complex fluids (inks) for the printed Radio Frequency Identification market (“RFID”). This unique capacitive coding technology links printed media to smart devices with the advantages of anti-counterfeiting and document security, and can be applied to curved surfaces and foil packaging.
Pressure Sensors
We also supply piezoresistive nanomaterial enhanced inks capable of creating flexible, printable, graphene-based sensor systems that can measure and collect high quality impact and pressure data.
Flexible Electronics
Using our HDPlas® process, our products offer flexible electronic solutions into a wide range of applications using our proprietary formulations. Working within a range of industries we have commercially ready solutions which will bring the next technology revolution to electronic components.
Biomedical Devices
We supply commercial quantities of functionalised graphene ink which is used to print test strips in the self-diagnostic biomedical sensor device market for diabetes monitoring.
Our graphene ink is the first of its kind being used in volume in this market, having gained regulatory approvals, including extensive production quantity in-line testing.It is proving to be a high quality, more stable, and consistent product, replacing the established graphite and carbon inks used extensively in producing the test strips for this significant global market.
In addition, as a second phase some customers are now trialling an all-carbon sensor utilising our graphene-enhanced ink that is aimed at removing the need for the expensive silver conductive ink tracks extensively used today. The outcome is a more environmentally friendly (potentially recyclable) product, and if achieved, we believe that this breakthrough could have a significant effect on the industry.
We are gaining significant market attention due to the quality, stability, adhesive properties and consistency of our graphene inks compared to the widely used graphite and other carbon materials available today. A crucial metric used by the specialist printers to measure the repeatability and accuracy of sensor readings delivered by the inks they use is its coefficient of variation or C/V ratio, where a low percentage indicates a high consistent, repeatability factor. Reports received by HTW from printers using its graphene inks have shown an exceptionally low C/V ratio of approximately 0.5%, demonstrating an accuracy rating of over 99%, which is believed to be well above the industry norm.