"Smart Microparticles" Could Let You Diagnose Faulty Electronics with a Simple Ultraviolet Light
Glowing under UV, tiny particles can act as ID tags for components — and even reveal their historical temperature limits.
A team of scientists at Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nürnberg (FAU) have come up with a "smart microparticle" that could make future electronics significantly easier to diagnose and repair — by highlighting faults with light.
The team, led by Karl Mandel, PhD and professor of inorganic chemistry at FAU, developed a particle measuring between one and 10 micrometers which, when exposed to ultraviolet light, provide not only information on a component's identity but a history of the temperatures to which it was recently exposed — by glowing in a mix of red, green, and blue light.
The trick comes in the particular color mix: The signal ratio between green and red light is used to identify particular components, acting like a serial number; the ratio between blue and green light shows the maximum temperature the part reached; and an irreversible loss of intensity in the blue channel shows that a part has exceeded its maximum operating temperature — handily highlighting, if not the root cause of the failure, than at least a part that will need to be replaced.
"We envision a flexibly applicable additive that can equip any random object with intelligence," the team writes in its paper on the subject. "Two types of inorganic lanthanide-doped nanoparticle building blocks with an environmentally inert luminescence in the green and red wavelength area, respectively, were intended to act as coding elements."
"A third building block, capable of recording the surrounding's temperature, was envisaged to come in form of an organic, dye-doped polymer nanoparticle with blue luminescence emission."
The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.