Some marine organisms provide examples of intricately organized architectures preserved in silica and calcium carbonate, according to Dr. Hongyou Fan, research scientist at UNM and Sandia. But until recently, templating procedures to create materials with multiple levels of structural order have been limited primarily to oxides with no specific functionality and processing times ranging from hours to days. Brinker's group has developed technology to introduce thousands of functions into ink that are rapidly printable, on the order of seconds.
Surfactants are detergents, which contain hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts.
To make the silica suitable as ink for printing, fluidity and stability are maintained by carefully controlling the acid concentration. Materials such as silica and polymers give structural soundness once out of solution. These form the basis of resists and low-k materials. Smart ink assembles into hierarchical nanostructures, which form a network of microchannels. Depending on the solidifying material, heat treatment will change the level of fluidity of the surfactant, effectively increasing porosity and changing the index of refraction and dielectric constant.