In a breakthrough towards “green electronics”, researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Jodhpur, have developed transistors with biodegradable gelatin as an electrical insulator, which may be utilised as breath analyser. The changes in the property of transmitting electric force by exposure to moisture will enable the device to measure respiratory rate.
IIT’s Flexible Large Area Microelectronics (FLAME) research group, headed by Professor Shree Prakash Tiwari, has used the natural protein gelatin, with a unique amino acid profile, for the fabrication of high-performance organic field-effect transistors. The FLAME group has been working in the field of green technologies for organic and flexible electronics for several years.
Research scholar Vivek Raghuwanshi, a member of the FLAME group, said on Tuesday that the transistor devices, along with the circuit applications, were capable of monitoring health indicators in real time and could be used as breath rate analyser, which was still an evolving area. The work has been published recently in the American Chemical Society’s Applied Electronic Materials journal.
The FLAME group, comprising researchers mostly from IIT-Jodhpur’s Electrical Engineering Department, has also worked for the development of organic semiconductors on unconventional substrates, such as paper. “The transistors on paper showed a remarkable stability in ambient mode for more than six months,” Mr. Raghuwanshi said.
The gelatin transistors reacted quickly with rapid response and recovery time under the humidity exposure test and acted as an effective sensor, on the basis of which they can be used as prototypes of human health and breath analysers. The full-fledged equipment could be manufactured through further research and development.
Prof. Tiwari said the FLAME group’s work would make a huge impact on the Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled green electronics, considered extremely important for environment-friendly manufacturing technologies for the future. Other members of the group involved in the research on biodegradable devices include Pulkit Saxena, Sachin Rahi, Ajay Kumar Mahato and Ishan Varun.
