Large scale, highly conductive and patterned transparent films of silver nanowires onarbitrary substrates and their application in touch screens

Abstract

The application of silver nanowire films as transparent conductive electrodes has shownpromising results recently. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of a simple spraycoating technique to obtain large scale, highly uniform and conductive silvernanowire films on arbitrary substrates. We also integrated a polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS)-assisted contact transfer technique with spray coating, which allowed us to obtainlarge scale high quality patterned films of silver nanowires. The transparency andconductivity of the films was controlled by the volume of the dispersion usedin spraying and the substrate area. We note that the optoelectrical property,σDC/σOp, for various films fabricated was in the range 75–350, which is extremely high fortransparent thin film compared to other candidate alternatives to doped metal oxide film.Using this method, we obtain silver nanowire films on a flexible polyethyleneterephthalate (PET) substrate with a transparency of 85% and sheet resistance of33 Ω/sq, which is comparable to that of tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) on flexible substrates. In-depthanalysis of the film shows a high performance using another commonly used figure-of-merit,ΦTE. Also, Ag nanowire film/PET shows good mechanical flexibility and the application ofsuch a conductive silver nanowire film as an electrode in a touch panel has beendemonstrated.