Published in

Royal Society of Chemistry, RSC Advances, 25(5), p. 19659-19665

DOI: 10.1039/c5ra01303h

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Humidity assisted annealing technique for transparent conductive silver nanowire networks

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The surfactant polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) commonly used to synthesize silver nanowires (AgNW) in solution is known to negatively affect the performance of nanowire-based thin film electrodes. An insulating shell of polymer hinders tight contact between the nanowires themselves and between nanowires and substrate, resulting in high sheet resistance of freshly prepared nanowire films. Here, we develop a simple low-temperature method allowing to reduce the sheet resistance of AgNW networks and simultaneously improving the optical transmittance. The method is based on the capacity of PVP to absorb moisture which results in a strong decrease of the glass transition temperature of the polymer. The latter leads to softening effects, causing a reduced wire contact resistance already at 60 °C for 90 nm thick AgNWs and even at 45 °C for 35 nm thick AgNWs. As a result, the sheet resistances of the thin film electrodes treated by our method are near to the values conventionally obtained after thermal annealing at temperatures between 140-250 °C. Our humidity assisted low temperature approach is especially advantageous for organic electronics and fabricating devices on thermally sensitive transparent flexible foils.