Abstract
Silver nanowires have attracted much attention for use in flexible transparent conductive films (TCFs) due to their low sheet resistance and flexibility. However, the haze was too high for replacing indium-tin-oxide in high-quality display devices. Herein, we report flexible TCFs, which were prepared using a scalable bar-coating method, with a low sheet resistance (24.1 Ω/sq at 96.4% transmittance) and a haze (1.04%) that is comparable to that of indium-tin-oxide TCFs. To decrease the haze and maintain a low sheet resistance, small diameter silver nanowires (~20 nm) were functionalized with low-temperature surface-sintering silver nanoparticles (~5 nm) using bifunctional cysteamine. The silver nanowire-nanoparticle ink stability was excellent. The sheet resistance of the TCFs was decreased by 29.5% (from 34.2 to 24.1 Ω/sq) due to the functionalization at a low curing temperature of 85 °C. The TCFs were highly flexible and maintained their stability for more than 2 months and 10,000 bending cycles after coating with a protective layer.
Highlights
Silver nanowires have attracted much attention for use in flexible transparent conductive films (TCFs) due to their low sheet resistance and flexibility
Other alternatives consist of metal-based TCFs including metal/metal alloy grids, nanotroughs, and nanowires that exhibit excellent sheet resistance at high transmittance due to the high conductivity of metals[2,4,7,12,13,14,15]
A large haze leads to blurriness, which becomes problematic for display devices and touch screens where clear visibility is required[17]
Summary
The area map of the sheet resistance is provided and demonstrates the uniformity of the TCF (curing temperature = 8 5 °C, relative concentration of CA-Ag NPs over Ag NWs = 0 .16 w/w%). This simple solution-based coating technology is another advantage for decreasing TCF fabrication costs compared to vapour-phase sputtering or multi-step processes[17]. The sheet resistance of the TCFs prepared using pure Ag NWs (relative concentration of CA-Ag NPs = 0 w/w%) increased from 31.4 to 34.2 Ω /sq as the curing temperature decreased from 130 to 85 °C. The TCFs prepared using CA-Ag NP/Ag NWs were highly flexible and maintained their stability for more than 2 months and 10,000 bending cycles after coating with a protective layer
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