CircuitWorks Conductive Paint

If a thinner coating is required, conductive ink can be thinned using butyl acetate solvent. Using other solvents to thin the conductive ink is not recommended, as they may change the properties of the acrylic polymer or force the polymer out of solution. 

A trace drawn with the conductive ink will combine with solder, provided the soldering temperature does not exceed 350°F (177°C) and the solder joint is formed within 5 seconds. If the drawn trace must be soldered to, we recommended that tin/lead solder containing 2% silver be used and that the trace is heat-cured at 150°F (66°C) for five minutes to produce the most durable trace possible.

CircuitWorks Conductive Paint is a single component, silver-filled polymer that dries in minutes at room temperature, making it an ideal solution for patching EMI/RFI shielding. The kit comes with brushes, swabs, and a plastic pick to repair large and small areas. In the case of metal screen and wire mesh, it is important that the holes in the screen or mesh are significantly smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being kept out. The goal of such mesh designs is to maintain a consistent hole pattern with a conductive material to ensure electrical continuity. Such a mesh can be repaired by restoring the hole pattern using polyimide tape and CircuitWorks Conductive Paint. Simply apply the polyimide tape to the inside of the mesh and carefully restore the mesh pattern with the CW2205. It is important to ensure that the contact is maintained between the mesh and the conductive paint. A second layer of polyimide tape can be applied to the opposite side for increased durability. Since the polyimide tape is invisible to electromagnetic fields at these wavelengths, the polyimide tape can remain and the EMI shield is restored. Another common situation is that the aluminum foil inside shielded cable is damaged. Similar to the case above, this will cause a loss of continuity and could again allow electromagnetic interference. A simple repair in this case is to repair the hole or tear with polyimide tape and then use the CircuitWorks Conductive Paint to paint the tape and restore continuity.

A common method of repairing a broken trace is to solder on a jumper, which is basically a wire bypass around the broken trace. This can be time-consuming and visually unappealing. Chemtronics offers CircuitWorks® Conductive Pens, which contain a highly conductive material like silver or nickel suspended in a liquid polymer. These pens allow you to literally redraw the trace.

The shelf life of a product can be found on either the technical data sheet (TDS), available on the product page, or by looking on the certificate on conformance (COC). The COC can be downloaded by going to https://www.chemtronics.com/coc. Once you have the shelf life, you will need to add it to the manufacture date for a use-by date. The manufacture date can be identified by the batch number. The batch code used on most of our products are manufacture dates in the Julian Date format. The format is YYDDD, where YY = year, DDD = day. For example, 19200 translates to the 200th day of 2019, or July 19, 2019. This webpage explains and provides charts to help interpret our batch numbers: https://www.chemtronics.com/batch-codes.