Intense pulsed light-induced structure-transformed ultrathin Ni shell for improving the chemical, thermal, and electrical reliability of metal nanowire electrodes without transmittance loss

Abstract

Metal nanowires (NWs) boost the development of flexible transparent conductive electrodes (TCEs), but they are hardly applied in industrial productions due to poor reliability. Although various coating technologies have been used to resolve this issue, most of them deteriorate the transmittance of TCEs due to the thick coating shell. Herein, we propose a facile and highly compatible structural transformation process for fabricating core-shell NW TCEs with highly improved reliability. Instead of increasing the thickness of the coating shell to guarantee sufficient coverage around NWs, an instantaneous and surface heating technology of intense pulsed light is creatively applied to realize the structural transformation of scattered Ni crumbs into an ultrathin and uniform Ni coating shell. Results show that without the decline of the transmittance, the reliability of structure-transformed Ag@Ni (STAN) core-shell NW TCEs has been increased to 10 times higher than that of pristine Ag@Ni NW TCEs, which are much better than most of the state-of-the-art publications on core-shell NW TCEs. Flexible transparent heaters fabricated by the STAN NW TCEs exhibit both rapid response and long-term electrical stability. It is believed that the proposed structure-transformed coating method provides a novel and highly versatile way to generate ultrathin protective shells around NWs, which breaks the contradiction between achieving the high transmittance and obtaining the long-term reliability during the fabrication of NW TCEs.