Smart Packaging : printed electronics

Smart packaging – fiction or reality

'Smart packaging', which provides additional information to consumers in different languages, can read out instruction leaflets to visually-handicapped people, or play an advertising spot on printed foil monitors. Already the road to achieving this kind of electronic wizardry is mapped out. The key is intelligent ink. The strip conductors and components are made of organic polymers which are dissolved in a liquid phase, making them processible on a kind of inkjet printer.

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The declared aim of the developers here is to be able to offer such a chip for use in the mass segments of the beverages industry, at a price of under one cent. Within just a few years this should be a reality. These printed RFID labels will then be able to monitor temperature accurately all the time and store and transfer data. And it´s not only this kind of passive data storage that is at the threshold of large-scale industrial manufacture, so, too, are active electronic circuits made up of transistors, resistors, LEDs and capacitors also manufactured with inkjet printers. One idea is even to supply energy from printed batteries or solar cells. That is the key to animated images or advertising jingles.

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Printed electronics is opening up fascinating new potential: According to a report by market researchers NanoMarket, the market volume in electronic inks and substrates used in the manufacture of printed electronics, will rise from 1.1 billion dollars in 2008 to over 11.5 billion by 2015. And if visions can be valued in money, this shows one thing quite clearly: the smart future is already well under way.

Smart RFID sensors promise cheaper food and less waste

Lower food prices and less waste thanks to low-cost, smart sensors using Radio Frequency ID (RFID) technology could result from pioneering work at the University of Manchester, UK.

Scientists and engineers at The Syngenta Sensors University Innovation Centre (SSUIC) are developing technology that will allow more scientific ‘best before’ dates to be set by food producers and retailers.

Smart sensors integrated with Oyster-card type RFID technology are being used to track real-time stresses suffered by perishable goods from farm gate to retailer’s shelf.

Chemists, engineers and physicists have teamed up at the Innovation Centre to develop a system that uses battery-free RFID tags to monitor and record stress. The tags, costing about 10p to 20p compared with £20 for the current version, could lead to the wide scale deployment of the technology within three years.

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