The effects of nanoparticle shape on electrical conductivity of Ag nanomaterials

Abstract

Silver nanomaterials have a wide application in printed electronics due to their excellent electrical conductivity. However, less studies were done to investigate the effects of nanoparticle shape on conductance. In this work, silver nanocubes with edge length of 45 nm and silver nanospheres with the same diameter of 45 nm were successfully prepared via polyol synthesis, and then characterized by scan electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry and dynamic light scattering. Subsequently, the electric conductivities of pastes filled with Ag nanocubes and Ag nanospheres were measured using four point probe resistance measurement by coating on glasses, the result of which showed that, the conductance of Ag nanospheres paste was much superior to that of Ag nanocubes paste with the same silver content and with or without the same mass ratio of m (Ag) /m (PVP) . The possible underlying mechanism was further deeply analyzed.

Coarse-grained molecular dynamics integrated with convolutional neural network for comparing shapes of temperature sensitive bottlebrushes

“…These shapes from nature have served as an inspiration for the scientific community to synthesize soft-and hard-nanomaterials of different shapes [7][8][9][10][11] . Considerable research has been carried out to study the effect of shape on electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties of such macromolecules [12][13][14][15][16][17] , resulting in applications like portable displays, heat exchangers, biological imaging, and drug discovery 18 . However, synthetic chemists face limitations with regards to precisely controlling the shapes and dimensions of these soft-nanomaterials; often representing complex shapes with their easier-to-synthesize simpler analogues 19,20 .…”