Preparation And Study Of Conductive Composites Based On Copper Nanowires

With the rapid improvement of the people's standard of living,transparent conductors in the future should be bendable,expandable,and deformable into complex shapes with good reliability and integration,such as in the use of stretchable display,energy-related devices,stretchable solar cells,stretchable integrated circuits,and elastomeric organic transistors.Though indium tin oxide?ITO?has been mainly applied in the field of transparent conductors,several critical issues,such as high cost and scarcity of raw materials,and brittleness limited its wide use in many fields.As a kind of important functional materials,conductive polymer and composite possess both conductivity and stretchability.In this study,especially long copper nanowires?CuNWs?were prepared by hydrothermal method as conductive medium.Self-healing conductor and flexible film heater have been fabricated by employing self-healing polyurethane and heat-resistant polyacrylate based on CuNWs film,respectively.A self-healing flexible transparent conductor comprising a core-shell copper nanowire network and healable polyurethane sheath was developed.The polyurethane pre-polymer containing furan rings was cross-linked with N,N'-?4,4'-methylenediphenyl?dimaleimide via a Diels-Alder reaction to form the healable network polymer.This thin polymer layer solders the copper nanowires and confines the nanowire network on the substrate surface.The nanocomposite conductor exhibits a sheet resistance of 22.3?·sq^-1.98%of the surface conductivity can be recovered in 3 min at 120°C,and the damaging-healing behavior could be repeated 5 times at the same position.The present work provides a simple way to fabricate advanced flexible transparent conductors.A flexible thin film heater was based on a silver nanowire/heat-resistant polyacrylate composite,and this polyacrylate was prepared by mass polymerization.One of these composite conductors had a sheet resistance of 20?·sq^-1.The composite film possessed outstanding heat-resistant property and could generate high temperature up to 80°C at 5 V in40 s,as an efficient thin film heater,exhibited rapid heating response and long-term stability of generated temperature.The composite film had an electro-optical performance superior to ITO/PET and was less expensive than AgNW-based film heaters.In particular,we envisioned this transparent heat-resistant film heater being particularly useful for flexible devices.