Abstract
Due to the susceptibility of Ag nanowires to external mechanical and chemical damage, maintaining high optical performance and ambient and mechanical stability during the fabrication process is important for the industrial use of Ag nanowire transparent electrodes (TEs). In this study, urethane acrylate-based photosensitive resin (UAPR) is used as the coating material for Ag nanowire TEs to improve their optical transmittance, ambient stability, and resistance to external wiping damage. In the proposed method, UV-curable UAPR is coated onto Ag nanowire TEs using a simple doctor blade, forming a protective coating that increases the optical transmittance of the electrodes due to the refractive index of the UAPR between the air and the substrate. The UAPR coating successfully protects the Ag nanowires from corrosion in ambient air, with no significant change in their optical or electrical properties observed after 180 h of exposure to ambient air. Mechanical wiping tests also confirm that the UAPR coating is effective in protecting the Ag nanowires from external wiping damage, with no degradation of the optical or electrical properties observed after six wiping cycles.
Highlights
Given the increasing advances in technological innovations for flexible electronics, the demand for chemically and mechanically reliable flexible transparent electrodes (TEs) has increased [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Because the Ag nanowire TEs were uniformly covered by the urethane acrylate-based photosensitive resin (UAPR), the network morphology was difficult to observe in the SEM image
UV-curable UAPR was coated onto the Ag nanowire TEs, and the resulting effect on the optical performance, ambient stability, and resistance to external wiping damage of the TEs was investigated
Summary
Given the increasing advances in technological innovations for flexible electronics, the demand for chemically and mechanically reliable flexible transparent electrodes (TEs) has increased [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Despite the advantages of Ag nanowires, they cannot be used alone in practical devices because of their susceptibility to oxidation and sulfidation in ambient air and their low scratch resistance Due to their large surface-to-volume ratio, Ag nanowires are oxidized and sulfidized, which leads to the degradation of the optical and electrical properties of the resulting TEs [21,25]. Polymer-based coating materials can be coated onto a substrate using simple printing or coating processes [21,24], reducing production costs compared to other coating candidates, while offering high chemical resistance and excellent mechanical properties. Scratch resistance was tested by measuring the sheet resistance as a function of the number of surface wiping cycles using an eddy current-based non-contact measuring system
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