Silver nanowires has been attracting more and more attention because of their intriguing electrical, thermal, and optical properties.Silver has the highest electrical conductivity among all the metals, by virtue of which Ag NWs are considered as very promising candidates in flexible electronics. Ag NWs thin film used as transparent electrode showed equal merit or better than that as compared with sputter-coated ITO in solar cells.
Ag NWs suspension can be directly and uniformly coated onto PET at room temperature without and hydrophilic or hydrophobnic pre-treatment of PET or coating materials, and no surfactants are required. However, the solvents are found to be very important to the uniformity of films. We have dispersed Ag NWs in distilled water, surfactants aqueous, ethylene glycol, methanol, and isopropanol. After 1h sonication, all of these suspentions agglomerated in 5 h. On the other hand, Ag NWs show much better dispersibility, and are easier to re dispersion in methanol and isopropyl alcohol than in aqueous solution.
Using nail polish, NW thin film have not caught up with ITO yet, this proposed fabrication method is simple and easy to be scaled up for large films, which is one of the key issues for applying this technology to commercial applications.
Low temperature solution-deposited Ag NWs networks embedded in ITO-NP matrices demontrate significant improvement in surface morphology, mechanical adhesion, and flexibility while maintaining the sheet resistance and transmittance values necessary to replace conventional sputtered ITO thin films.
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