Silver nanowires decorated with silver nanoparticles for low-haze flexible transparent conductive films

Abstract

Silver nanowires have attracted much attention for use in flexible transparent conductive films (TCFs) due to their low sheet resistance and flexibility. However, the haze was too high for replacing indium-tin-oxide in high-quality display devices. Herein, we report flexible TCFs, which were prepared using a scalable bar-coating method, with a low sheet resistance (24.1 Ω/sq at 96.4% transmittance) and a haze (1.04%) that is comparable to that of indium-tin-oxide TCFs. To decrease the haze and maintain a low sheet resistance, small diameter silver nanowires (~20 nm) were functionalized with low-temperature surface-sintering silver nanoparticles (~5 nm) using bifunctional cysteamine. The silver nanowire-nanoparticle ink stability was excellent. The sheet resistance of the TCFs was decreased by 29.5% (from 34.2 to 24.1 Ω/sq) due to the functionalization at a low curing temperature of 85 °C. The TCFs were highly flexible and maintained their stability for more than 2 months and 10,000 bending cycles after coating with a protective layer.

Ultrahigh Thermal Conductivity of Interface Materials by Silver‐Functionalized Carbon Nanotube Phonon Conduits

“…Surface atoms have fewer bonds with each other at the free surface, whereas the atoms in the bulk are evenly surrounded, and require less energy for coalescence. [22][23][24] No exothermic peak was observed for MWNTs and Ag NWs suggesting their apparent lack of thermal transition in the investigated temperature range (50-300 °C). [19,22] Multiple exothermic peaks were observed for nAgMWNTs (169, 176, 210, and 230 °C) indicating the active coalescence activity of Ag NPs functionalized on the surface of MWNTs.…”

“…[22][23][24] No exothermic peak was observed for MWNTs and Ag NWs suggesting their apparent lack of thermal transition in the investigated temperature range (50-300 °C). [19,22] Multiple exothermic peaks were observed for nAgMWNTs (169, 176, 210, and 230 °C) indicating the active coalescence activity of Ag NPs functionalized on the surface of MWNTs. [19] This is consistent with the transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observation (Figure 1b, inset).…”

“…Poly(vinylpyrrolidone) surfactant is also present on the surface of Ag NWs synthesized by the polyol process. [22] As shown in Figure 2c, the addition of nAgMWNTs (2.3 vol%) significantly increased carrier mobility (μ) from 3.59 cm 2 V −1 s −1 (Ag-flake-epoxy) to 54.5 cm 2 V −1 s −1 (nAgMWNT-Ag-flake-epoxy). Other secondary fillers provided smaller μ.…”

Optically controlled local nanosoldering of metal nanowires

“…The welding involves the process of fusion, which takes place along with the melting of base metal. The nanowelding of metal NWs has been implemented with several distinct methodologies, including cold welding or room-temperature welding, [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] thermal annealing welding, 24 electric joule heating welding, 25-29 electron beam welding, 30 and light-induced fusing welding (including plasmonic welding). 9,31-38 Our previous work on optically controlled local plasmonic nanowelding has demonstrated enhanced coupling efficiency by reducing the scattering loss of a plasmonic nanocoupler.…”

Highly transparent conductive ITO/Ag/ITO trilayer films deposited by RF sputtering at room temperature

“…Next, high optical transmittance in the visual spectrum is another important characteristic of a high-quality TCF. Due to the great advance of experimental exploration, a large variety of TCFs, including traditional metal oxides, 2-7 graphene, 8 carbon nanotubes, 9 metal nanostructures, [10][11][12][13][14] and so on, have been successfully fabricated and widely applied in optoelectronic devices. Among these TCFs, tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) dominates the market in high-end optoelectronics because of its excellent electrical and optical properties.…”