Electrical, Mechanical, and Electromagnetic Shielding Properties of Silver Nanowire-Based Transparent Conductive Films

In this work, an acrylate-based organic coating is developed to cover the electrically conductive silver nanowires (AgNWs) to improve the adhesion properties of AgNWs on PMMA substrates. A simple spray coating technique is performed to obtain large scale and highly uniform conductive silver nanowire films on PMMA substrates. The AgNWs covered by organic coatings are evaluated ex situ in terms of adhesion, transparency, electrical, mechanical, and electromagnetic shielding properties. Results indicated the adhesion of AgNWs covered by coatings is greatly superior to the uncovered AgNWs, which can be attributed to the strong hydrogen interfacial bond between the coating and PMMA substrate. Furthermore, the overall properties, including good transparency (80% in the visible range), flexibility (bending more than 1000 cycles), electromagnetic shielding (larger than 30GHz from 1 to 18GHz), meet the requirements of transparent parts in the aeronautical industry, and other commercial fields.