Swedish researchers create roses with integrated electronics – New Technology

       

florists in Norrkoping has new regular customers in recent years. There are scholars who buy fresh cut flowers – preferably pink cultivar Rosa floribunda.

But these flowers do not end up vases with plain flower nutrition. Instead, they suck up water laced with electrically conductive polymers. A few hours later, the electronic material is spread inside the plants.

We have succeeded in creating transistors in the trunk and simple displays of leaves . This opens the door to the electronics in the plants in a whole new way, says Magnus Berggren, Professor at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University.

He has conducted research on organic electronics and printed electronics where conductive polymers are printed on paper and cardboard since the late 1990s. Blom idea came when forest industry asked a challenging question: Why build ye not into electronics directly in the timber instead?

The task is tricky. Inside a living plant can not create designs with etching or photolithography, as in conventional electronics manufacture. The researchers therefore use plant ramifications and capillaries that normally transports water and nutrients.

In the first experiments died both roses and tulips when they sucked in the same polymers used in printed electronics.

Better luck with the biocompatible polymer PEDOT S: H, developed by chemist Roger Gabrielsson at Linköping University. At the same time triggered the contaminant plant chemical defense mechanism that takes up and releases ions with different charge.

– The magic is that the polymer is then released in the solid phase. When we saw the microscope images, we realized right away – here we have it, says Magnus Berggren.

He describes how a thin wire or film conductive material covering the inside of the roses thin liquid channels, the xylem. By connecting the electrodes to the stem researchers could then create transistors. A simple display function created when the electrodes instead placed against the blades so that the material could be updated electrically. When changing the blades color. The results presented in the scientific journal Science Advances.

Linköping researchers, collaborating with Professor Ove Nilsson and his colleagues at Umeå Plant Science Centre, sees many opportunities with the technology. One could get plants to produce new materials, creating small fuel cell powered by sugar from photosynthesis and produce small antennas. But the most tempting is to measure and release hormones that affect plant growth and development.

– The goal is ultimately to refine seedlings without genetic modification, says Magnus Berggren.

Here you can read the article in Science Advances.