Fluid driven self-assembly of woven Ag nanowire grid for ultra-flexible transparent electrodes

Highly oriented woven Ag-NW grids has great potential for enhancing the mechanical stabilities of flexible transparent electrodes (TEs) but few researchers reported. This work presents a flow driven self assembly approach for preparing the highly oriented woven Ag-NW grids. Due to the coupling effect of micro-structured silicon mold and thermocapillary flow induced by surface tension, two flow states of Ag-NWs ink are formed in sequence, which leads to the enrichment of Ag-NWs. Meanwhile, the selective deposition enables the highly oriented woven feature of Ag-NWs. Using elastomer casting and transferring processes, TEs of Ag-NWs embedded in PDMS are successfully obtained. Such TEs show remarkable mechanical performances with a low sheet resistance of similar to 20 Omega/square. The change of resistance is less than 0.8% even under the extreme bending deformation. A resistance increase of less than 2.9% is observed when the sample undergoes 14,000 cycles. The stretching results also demonstrate excellent mechanical performance. The uniform electroluminescence of electroluminescent device under the flat and bending states verified that a defect-free TE have been fabricated. These results imply that the as fabricated electrode is a promising candidate for flexible optoelectronic applications. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

In this work, a flow driven self-assembly approach was employed to prepare highly oriented woven Ag-NW grids, resulting in flexible transparent electrodes with remarkable mechanical performance and low sheet resistance. Through selective deposition and elastomer transferring processes, TE devices with excellent mechanical properties were successfully obtained. The fabricated electrodes exhibited uniform electroluminescence under both flat and bending states, indicating their promising potential for flexible optoelectronic applications.