Issue 4, 2018

Highly conductive and transparent copper nanowire electrodes on surface coated flexible and heat-sensitive substrates

Abstract

Copper nanowire (CuNW) based flexible transparent electrodes have been extensively investigated due to their outstanding performances and low price. However, commonly used methods for processing CuNW transparent electrodes such as thermal annealing and photonic sintering inevitably damage the flexible substrates leading to low transmittance. Herein, a surface coating layer was demonstrated to protect the heat-sensitive polyethylene terephthalate (PET) polymer from being destroyed by the instantaneous high temperature during the photonic sintering process. The stable ceramic surface coating layer avoided the direct exposure of PET to intense light, further reduced the heat releasing to the bottom part of the PET, protecting the flexible PET base from destruction and ensuring high transparency for the CuNW transparent electrodes. A CuNW transparent electrode on surface coated PET (C-PET) substrates with a sheet resistance of 33 Ohm sq−1 and high transmittance of 82% has been successfully fabricated by the photonic sintering method using light intensity of 557 mJ cm−2 within several seconds in ambient conditions. The surface coating layers open a novel method to optimize the rapid photonic sintering technique for processing metal nanomaterials on heat-sensitive substrates.

Graphical abstract: Highly conductive and transparent copper nanowire electrodes on surface coated flexible and heat-sensitive substrates

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
24 Nov 2017
Accepted
29 Dec 2017
First published
09 Jan 2018
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

RSC Adv., 2018,8, 2109-2115

Highly conductive and transparent copper nanowire electrodes on surface coated flexible and heat-sensitive substrates

S. Ding, Y. Tian, J. Jiu and K. Suganuma, RSC Adv., 2018, 8, 2109 DOI: 10.1039/C7RA12738C

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements