Abstract
On the long road towards low-cost flexible hybrid electronics, integration and printable solar energy harvesting solutions, there is an urgent need for high-performance transparent conductive electrodes produced using manufacturing-ready techniques and equipment. In recent years, randomly-distributed metallic nanowire-based transparent mesh electrodes have proven highly-promising as they offer a superb compromise between high performances and low fabrication costs. Unfortunately, these high figure-of-merit transparent mesh electrodes usually rely heavily on extensive post-deposition processing. While conventional thermal annealing yields good performances, it is especially ill-suited for deposition on low-temperature substrates or for high-throughput manufacturing solutions. Similarly, laser-induced annealing severely limits the processing time for electrodes covering large surfaces. In this paper, we report the fabrication of ultra high-performance silver nanowires-based transparent conductive electrodes fabricated using optimized manufacturing-ready ultrafast photonic curing solutions. Using conventional indium tin oxide (ITO) as our benchmark for transparent electrodes, we demonstrate a 2.6–2.7 times performance gain using two different figure-of-merit indicators. Based on these results, we believe this research provides an ideal manufacturing-ready approach for the large-scale and low-cost fabrication of ultra high-performance transparent electrodes for flexible hybrid electronics and solar-energy harvesting applications.
Highlights
Using standard commercial ITO as our comparison benchmark, we achieve a 2.6–2.7 × performance gain over ITO using two distinct figure-of-merit indicators. These electrodes can reach transparencies over 90% and sheet resistance values down to 9.8 /sq. , compared to 30 /sq. for standard ITO. While their performance equals the best results achieved with high-temperature pressure-rolling[9,30,32], this photonic curing process is compatible with low-temperature substrates and with the stringent requirements of high-speed roll-to-roll manufacturing lines[45,46]
The photonic sintering post-processing speeds are compatible with industrial manufacturing equipment used for printed electronics
While the SimPulse simulation results are consistent with the literature, we observe it does not account for the interaction between nanoparticles. As long as this model limitation is well understood, the simulation tool is accurate, and we conclude that it can be used for rapid optimization of the photonic treatment parameters for industrial-grade manufacturing purposes
Summary
This report describes how we take advantage of simulation and careful control of the high-speed photonic curing of an interconnected network of silver nanowires, in order to manufacture the best high-performance transparent conductive electrodes. Averaging the TCE transmittance values over the visible spectrum (400–800 nm), we obtain 91.5%, 88.3%, 82.8% and 74.7% for samples with 1, 2, 3 and 4 nanowire layers respectively. Based on the simulation results (Fig. 1), the values of sheet resistance can be obtained using the established pulse conditions and number of pulses for photonic treatment of the samples.
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