FME Talk by Yusuf Mulla

The first wheel was made of wood, the first computer mouse was made of wood body, the first houses were made with wood. But today's life is circling around silicon and plastics. Should we go back to survive in future?

Rapid advancement in materials science, miniaturized electronics and fabrication technologies have shrunk electronics to nanometers scale and stretched wireless communication to kilometers scales. Internet of sensors and connected homes, wearable devices and consumer electronics have become inherent and inevitable aspects of current digitalized life. These advancements have also given birth to challenges of plastic and electronic wastes totalling 200 million tons of annual waste, posing Herculean task of sorting recycling massive amounts of highly complex mixtures of materials. One way to mitigate these challenges is to develop ‘Green electronics’ - materials, processes, devices and systems that might not need disassembly and sorting, that have low toxicological and carbon footprint and can be reused/recycled to be ‘Best from Waste’. Energy efficient and sustainable additive manufacturing techniques, and energy harvesting & storage techniques employing bio-based or biodegradable materials might answer few questions of these Sisyphean challenges.

This presentation will present several methods of manufacturing complex sensors, printed circuits, energy harvesters and electronic devices using combination of additive manufacturing techniques (Inkjet, Screen, Aerosol Jet printing), sustainable photonic sintering/soldering technique, and employing sustainable forest based materials. To address the challenges of rapidly evolving field of wearable electronics, recent advances in stretchable and skin conformable electronics based on printed electronics will be presented. Electronics from wood, on wood and for wood with laser induced graphene i.e. Green-Grey sustainable electronics will be discussed. Our future is apparently in past experience of centuries of living in and with forests. Let us take a leap back into the future!

Since 2018 Yusuf is working as senior scientist and project manager with Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) in the field of sensors and sustainable printed electronics. He received his Bachelor´s degree in Instrumentation Engineering (BE) from Shivaji University (India), and M.Sc. in Scientific Instrumentation from the University of Applied Sciences, Jena (Germany). In 2014 he graduated with PhD in Chemical and molecular sciences from the University of Bari (Italy) with Marie Curie PhD fellowship in EU project FlexSMELL. He is alumnus post-doc of University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy) and Linköping University (Sweden) at Laboratory of Organic Electronics (LOE), e-plants team. He is engaged with national and international EU projects related to graphene based sensor technology, wearable electronics and sustainable printed electronics. Yusuf brings with him experience in biosensors, organic electronic devices (OFETs, OECTs); wearable electronics; graphene based transistors and sensor technology; Screen, inkjet, aerosol jet & 3D printing techniques, plant-human electrophysiology.