Cost-effective centrifuge coating method for silver nanowire-based transparent conducting electrode

Abstract

The silver nanowire (Ag NW)-based electrode, a promising candidate for replacing the conventional indium tin oxide (ITO) electrode, is suitable for flexible device fabrication due to low cost production, high electrical conductivity, high transparency, and mechanical flexibility. Although many types of coating processes exist to produce Ag NW films, those methods require post-treatments and a Ag NW solution with a high concentration in excess of 0.5 mg/ml. In this work, we report a cost-effective method to produce a Ag NW electrode on a flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate using centrifuge coating with a Ag NW solution with extremely low concentrations of 0.003–0.02 mg/ml without post-treatment. The optimized Ag NW electrode has a sheet resistance of 7.25 Ω/sq and optical transmittance of 73.62% in the visible wavelength region, resulting in a figure-of-merit value (FOM) of 157.13, which is better than that of a commercial ITO electrode. As a result, organic photovoltaic devices based on this Ag NW electrode on a PET substrate exhibited a power conversion efficiency of 7.61%, which is comparable to that of devices based on an ITO electrode.