Synthesis And Applications Of Silver Nanowires In Transparent Electrodes

Silver nanowires?Ag NWs?as a one-dimensional inorganic metal nanomaterial,not only has a good electrical property,but has unique physical,chemical and biological properties in optoelectronics,catalysis,biological sensing and other fields due to the small size effect,the surface effect,quantum size effect,which caused extensive attention of researchers.At the same time,because of the excellent electrical conductivity and flexibility of Ag NWs,the transparent conductive electrodes?TCEs?that fabricated with Ag NWs have good conductivity,transparency and excellent flexibility,which are regarded as the most promising material to replace the traditional indium tin oxide?ITO?with hard material.The excellent properties of Ag NW TCEs depend on the morphology,structure,size of nanowires and types of substrate materials.Thus,the technology which synthesizes Ag NWs controllably and substrate preparation are required urgently for realizing the industrial applications.Polyol method was used to synthesize Ag NWs.In this paper,we explored the process and growth mechanism of Ag NWs,and discussed the effect of different parameters to the preparation of Ag NWs,including the molar concentration ratio of PVP and AgNO₃,the volume of PtCl₂ solution,the molecular weight of PVP,reaction time,and reaction temperature.This work realized the controllable synthesis of Ag NWs in the process of parameter optimization and we obtained the best experiment scheme of synthesizing Ag NWs in the glycol system.Then,the morphology and structure of the Ag NWs were presented in this paper.The result showed that the product has the face-centred cubic structure and excellent crystallinity.According to the optimal scheme,the amplification experiment was done and we also received Ag NWs with uniform morphology.The result demonstrated that the best scheme has a good stability and high repeatability,and can be applied to the commercial manufacturing.In this paper,the Ag NWs transparent electrodes of polyethylene terephthalate?PET?substrate and grid glass substrate were prepared by direct surface coating and rotating sedimentation,respectively.For Ag NWs-PET thin film electrodes,we discussed the effect of the concentration of Ag NWs dispersions on the photoelectric properties of the films.The result shows that the higher the concentration of Ag NWs dispersions,the better the conductivity and the worse the transmittance of the electrodes and vice versa.At the same time,the bending experiment of each electrode sample was carried out.The result shows that the thin film electrodes prepared by this method have a good stability under severe bending and no great change in sheet resistance.For Ag NWs-grid glass electrodes,in order to solve the problem of the polarization between transmission and electrical conductivity of the Ag NWs-PET electrodes,two kinds of Ag NWs with different diameters were used to fill the substrates with different specifications.The result shows that the electrodes with a small grid width and Ag NWs with a small diameter have a better comprehensive photoelectric performance.Finally,the organic solar cell?OSC?device was fabricated by using the Ag NWs-PET electrode and the power conversion efficiency of the device is 1.01%.The thin film circuit was fabricated with the Ag NWs-grid substrates.The two results show that the poor adhesion and high roughness of Ag NWs on the substrates become the biggest obstacles of Ag NWs electrode applications.If we can further enhance the adhesion and reduce the roughness of Ag NWs electrodes,it will be used more widely.