A concise and antioxidative method to prepare copper conductive inks in a two-phase water/xylene system for printed electronics

This paper introduces a method to prepare copper nanoparticles in a two-phase water/xylene system, to be used in the fabrication of ink with high conductivity for printed electronics. Copper conductive inks were obtained simply by extracting the xylene layer containing copper nanoparticles from the reaction system. The particles are monodisperse and range in size from 8 to 29 nm and have no direct contact with air, from nucleation to the preparation of inks. Conductive films prepared using the inks have relatively low resistivity after sintering, which enables their application in electronic devices. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.