Study Of Silver Nanowires Films Fabricated By Different Methods

Materials with high electrical conductivity and optical transparency are important components of many electronic and optoelectronic devices such as liquid crystal displays, solar cells, and light emitting diodes. Tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) is used widely at present for these technological applications. Although ITO have witnessed 50 years of extensive research and subsequent applications, recently, there has been a quest to look for materials that can replace ITO as the most important transparent conductive electrode (TCE). Due to low availability of indium sources, the cost of ITO is rising and its brittleness limites applicability in flexible electronic devices as well.Silver nanowire films are promising alternatives to ITO films as transparent conductive electrodes. In this dissertation, we studies two methods to synthesis silver nanowires and three methods to fabricate the silver nanowire films. The one kind of silver nanowires is longer than the other one, but the other one is uniformity in length. The first method to fabricate the films is that the use of vacuum filtration and a transfer printing technique to fabricate silver nanowire films on flexible substrates, the better performance among alternatives is 25 Ω/sq at 70% transparency or 125 Q/sq at 85% transparency. Using this transfer technique, we obtained silver nanowire films on a flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate with good mechanical flexibility. The second one is fabrication of silver nanowire films by volatilizezing solvent on transparent substrate and the best performance is 45 Ω/sq at 60% transparency. The third one is the use of shearing force under mixing flow field to fabricate silver nanowire films (the best performance:35 Ω/sq at 85% transparency).