Electroless copper plating on a polydopamine modified polyimide as a flexible current collector

Abstract

Flexible and stretchable conductive materials play an important role in wearable devices. Stretchable conductive material has great impact on the performance of wearable electronic products. Nowadays, a stretchable and flexible current collector that combines mechanical stability and stable electrical conductivity attracts great attention in the field of flexible electronic devices. In this work, polyimide (PI) is used as the substrate, PI film is prepared by alkaline hydrolysis activation pretreatment, sequentially modified by grafting dopamine to obtain a PI film coated with polydopamine (PDA) coating on the surface. Then, the PDA@PI film is embedded with Ag particles via plasma treatment. And the obtained sample is put into the copper plating solution for electroless copper plating, and the time and temperature of the copper plating are accurately controlled to obtain a PI/Cu composite film. At the temperature of 70 ^oC after 10 min plating, the PI/Cu composite film exhibits uniform surface morphology excellent electrical properties with extraordinary flexibility