Abstract
Over the past few years, there has been an increasing demand for stretchable electrodes for flexible and soft electronic devices. An electrode in such devices requires special functionalities to be twisted, bent, stretched, and deformed into variable shapes and also will need to have the capacity to be restored to the original state. In this study, we report uni- or bi-axially wrinkled graphene–silver nanowire hybrid electrodes comprised of chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-grown graphene and silver nanowires. A CVD-grown graphene on a Cu-foil was transferred onto a bi-axially pre-strained elastomer substrate and silver nanowires were sprayed on the transferred graphene surface. The pre-strained film was relaxed uni-(or bi-)axially to produce a wrinkled structure. The bi-axially wrinkled graphene and silver nanowires hybrid electrodes were very suitable for high actuating performance of electro-active dielectric elastomers compared with the wrinkle-free case. Present results show that the optical transparency of the highly stretchable electrode can be successfully tuned by modulating input voltages.
Highlights
Smart windows, which can control the level of light transmission, have recently been attracting great interest, because they can be applied to a variety of applications, including vehicle windows, exterior wall windows and skylight windows
Techniques using a soft dielectric elastomer and stretchable electrodes are being studied for controlling surface morphology by applying electric input voltages
We developed a wrinkled hybrid electrode, comprised of chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-grown graphene and silver nanowires, and reported a tunable transmittance by applying electrical fields to the dielectric elastomer actuators sandwiched with the wrinkled graphene–silver nanowire hybrid electrodes
Summary
Smart windows, which can control the level of light transmission, have recently been attracting great interest, because they can be applied to a variety of applications, including vehicle windows, exterior wall windows and skylight windows. Most smart window technology has been based on the redox reaction of a molecular element and a chromic material in response to external stimuli such as light, electricity, or temperature [1,2,3,4]. Such materials are chemically unstable during the conversion processes, and are further disadvantageous in that they are difficult to control [4]. Techniques using a soft dielectric elastomer and stretchable electrodes are being studied for controlling surface morphology by applying electric input voltages. Smart window technology based on such soft materials can be applied to micro-lens arrays [13,14], flexible electronic devices [15,16], and variable diffraction gratings [17]
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