A facile way for scalable fabrication of silver nanowire network electrodes for high-performance and foldable smart windows

Large-area, free-standing silver (Ag) nanowire (NW) transparent conductive electrodes (TCEs) are fabricated by a facile and high-throughput automatic-blade-coating assembly technique, enabled by the use of a flexible and transparent polymer matrix. Such developed TCEs exhibit high transparency, excellent conductivity, superior flexibility, long-term stability and strong structural integrity. The excellent flexibility allows the TCEs to be bent >10 000 times without any performance degradation. As a proof of concept, these TCEs are used to fabricate flexible suspended particle devices (SPDs) for smart window applications. Our devices show a large change in their optical transmittance (60.2%) and fast switching time (21 s) as well as excellent stability, comparable to the best SPD performance data reported in the literature. Moreover, significantly better than commercial TCE-based devices, the SPDs based on our TCEs show excellent mechanical flexibility, which can be folded by 180 degrees for more than 200 cycles without any obvious performance degradation. The present method for fabricating large area and ultra-flexible Ag NW TCEs may be extended to fabricate various NW-based nonplanar or curved electronic/optoelectronic devices in the future.