Semiconductor Experiments

Filament
1

I have been thinking about 3D printing semiconductors for a while now, just occasionally returning to the topic. Then i see this excellent article on the site here:

https://www.lulzbot.com/learn/tutorials/accelerated-aging-your-metal-bearing-3d-prints

And I know that early experimenters in the field of semiconductors used copper oxide (from a wikipedia article), and basically the whole technique of aging metals is making metal rust which is all semiconductors I would guess…

So what if we could make a filament that was a semiconductor in part? Could we make diodes or transistors, even really bad ones?

This time a few minutes ago my mind ran amok with notions of printing a coil of 3mm filament mixing materials like graphene and copperFill, rusting, reprinting, rusting until the desired properties existed.

Or we have PLA with it’s low Tc and our bed goes to 120C, can we melt a stick of PLA onto a rusted copperclad board? would that make a diode?

Please advise.

Les

2

Well, there’s this…

https://www.lulzbot.com/store/filament/conductive-pla

3

Yes there is the Prot-Pasta conductive filament which is great for resistors and high impedance, low current wires. There are also two brands that I know of selling graphene filament which is crazy expensivee and about 10x more conductive, so better for wires but still way too resistive for current or speed applications.

So yes that is good to know. What I’m talking about is, say: printing diodes or transistors.

Les