Improving the optical transparency of film heaters based on silver nanowire/polyimide composite films

Abstract

A highly transparent and flexible thin film heater based on silver nanowires (AgNWs) was fabricated by a facile full-solution method. Here, we firstly embedded AgNWs in colorless polyimide (cPI) to ensure thermal stability and flexibility of transparent film heater, and then deposited an antireflective (AR) layer of silica (SiO2) on AgNW/cPI film to improve the transmittance of the composite film. The developed highly transparent film heater exhibits an increase of 3.5% in transmittance at 550 nm at a sheet resistance of 17.0 Ω sq−1 for SiO2/cPI/AgNW composite film. At the same time, the film heater shows an excellent heating performance and mechanical flexibility. Furthermore, the application of the composite film in thermochromic display devices was also demonstrated. Such encouraging results show large potential for thermochromic display devices and other heating systems.