Studies On The Optoelectronic Performance Of Silver Network Fabricated By Electroless Plating Combined With Electrospun Template

Transparent conductive materials are essential components of smart terminals such as flat-panel displays,solar cells,light emitting diodes.Although indium tin oxide?ITO?is the most widely used commercial transparent conducting material,it suffers from inherent brittleness and low abundance of raw materials,which hinder its use in flexible electronics.Among massive effort enveloping alternative flexible transparent conductive materials,metal nanowire networks possess the advantages of easy preparation,high electrical conductivity,and mechanical flexibility.As a result,metal nanowire networks are widely accepted as the most promising candidates to replace ITO in flexible electronics.Metal nanowire networks are generally prepared by spin or blade coating single-crystal metal nanowires synthesized by a hydrothermal process or by depositing polycrystalline metal films on various mesh templates.Among them,the silver nanowire?Ag NW?networks fabricated by electroless plating combined with electrospun template has some advantages,such as the low cost,large area preparation and small contact resistance between silver nanowires,etc.Using this way to fabricate metal nanowire network has come into the spotlight.Although considerable improvements have been made in the quality of solution-grown metal nanowire network,their optoelectronic performance still needs to be raised.This is primarily because most metals follow Volmer–Weber-mode growth and do not effectively form continuous films on hydrophobic polymer NW surfaces.The chemically plated metals tend to migrate in a disordered fashion and coalesce into discrete granules.Increasing the metal layer thickness by lengthening the deposition time usually leads to a drastic decrease in transmittance rather than increases in metal layer continuity and conductivity because of the unavoidable metal deposition on the substrate and continuous growth of metal clusters.In addition,Ag NWs is easily oxidized in the air.In this work,we focused on modulating the metal-layer formation modes on polymer nanowires to improve the performance of solution-processed metal nanowire networks.The combination of plasma treatment and Joule heating may overcome the shortcomings of the abovementioned methods and provide continuous metal layers on polymer surfaces.The deposition selectively deposits zinc oxide on the surface of the Ag NWs to improve the chemical stability of the silver nanowires.Main results are as follows:1.Optimization of the photoelectric properties of Ag NWs by plasma treatment.The electrospun fiber template is treated by argon plasma.The Ag layers on the treated templates exhibited more uniform Ag nanoparticle seed distribution,faster growth rate,and smoother Ag film morphology than those of the Ag layers on untreated templates;And the content of stannous chloride in the electrospinning precursor solution,electrospinning conditions and electroless deposition conditions were studied in detail,and the optimal condition parameters were obtained.2.Joule heat treatment to improve the conductivity of Ag NWs.The electrical conductivity of the Ag-coated NW network was improved by optimizing the input DC voltage.It was found that the localized Joule heating targeted the high-resistance interfaces between the Ag granules and at the grain boundaries in the Ag-coated NFs,and thus helped to reshape the contact pathways and lower the interface barrier for electron conduction.R/R₀ of the Ag NWs decreased to 0.45.Using these methods,we were able to fabricate Ag-coated NW network with a high transmittance of⁹1%,low sheet resistance of 5.4?/sq.And we test the heating property of the Ag NW networks.The surface temperature of Ag NW networks distribution is uniform.At 6 V voltage,the heating rate is 11°C/s.Interface engineering can be used to improve the conductivity of other polycrystalline metal networks designed for use in flexible electronics.3.Study the flexibility and chemical stability of Ag NW networks.Mechanical stretching and bending tests were tested on Ag NW networks.In the bending test,the Ag NW networks still maintains good electrical conductivity under the condition of bending radius of 3 mm and bending 1000 times;in the tensile test,Ag NW networks is stretched to 50%.The resistance is increased by 1 time.After the tensile recovery to the original state,the resistance value also returns to the original resistance value;and this paper proposes to selectively deposit a layer of zinc oxide on the surface of the Ag NW networks by electrochemical deposition.When the influence of the photoelectric performance of the line network is small,the chemical stability of the Ag NW networks is improved,and the resistance is hardly changed in the constant temperature and humidity chamber for 110 h.