Instability of silver nanowire (AgNW) has been regarded as a major obstacle to its practical applications in optoelectrical devices as transparent electrodes. Physical barrier layers such as polymer, metal, and graphene have been generally employed to improve the stability of AgNW in previous study. Herein, we first report self-assembled organothiols as an inhibitor for AgNW to achieve an overall enhancement in antioxidation, antisulfidation, thermal stability, and anti-electromigration. The self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of phenyl azoles, methoxy silane, and methyl alkane were formed on the surface of AgNW via Ag−S covalent bond as barrier layers which provided protective effects against corrosives (e.g., O 2 , H 2 S). In particular, the decoration of 2-mercaptobenzimidazole (MBI) offered the best resistance to H 2 S and excellent stability under a high-temperature and high-humidity environment (85 °C and 85 RH %) for 4 months. Moreover, different SAMs exhibited a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on Plateau−Rayleigh instability of AgNW, which realized the tunability of degradation temperature of AgNWs, for example, increasing by ≥100 °C with MBI SAM or decreasing by ∼50 °C with octadecanethiol SAM compared with pristine AgNWs. Notably, the MBIdecorated AgNWs could survive at 400 °C which is by far the highest bearing temperature for solution-processed AgNW film. As a result, a transparent heater made of the MBI-AgNWs exhibited superior heating characteristics (higher working temperature and durability), as compared with the pristine AgNW-based heater. Our findings on the organothiols decoration not only provide a new paradigm in overall stability improvement of NW of noble metals but also show the potential in morphology controllability of metal NW.
In this study, an electrostatically assisted dip-coating process was proposed by employing amino-modified zinc-oxide nanoparticles (NH2-ZnONPs) as an assistance layer to attract intrinsically negatively charged silver nanowires (AgNWs), which significantly alleviated the aggregation of AgNWs and improved the deposition efficiency. The uniform AgNW/ZnONP was further capped with an eco-friendly ultraviolet-curable cellulose to provide the film with a good water resistance, strong adhesion, and excellent anti-oxidation. Furthermore, a triboelectric generator was demonstrated using the AgNW-composite electrodes, verifying the applicability of the electrode. The electrostatic coating technique and tailored hydroxy propyl methyl cellulose (HPMC) are potentially applicable to other metal nanowires.
Paper-based electronics are gaining increasing attention because of their merits of low cost, degradability, and foldability. However, the roughness and porosity of paper are not conducive to the deposition of functional layers by conventional film-coating methods such as solution processing and vacuum evaporation. In this work, a facile yet feasible process to fabricate a paper-based electrophoretic display (EPD) was demonstrated. This device combines the eco-friendly characteristic of paper with the low power consumption of an EPD by using optically clear adhesive (OCA) and silver nanowires (AgNWs). The AgNW/OCA/paper composite layer could maintain high conductivity after 1000-cycle folding tests, whereas AgNWs spray-deposited on printing paper lost their conductivity after only 400 folding–unfolding cycles. To optimize the trade-off between the optical transmittance and the sheet resistance of the AgNW/OCA top electrode, the concentration of AgNW ink and the surface energy of the UV-curable polymer layer were adjusted, achieving a figure-of-merit value of 287. The paper-based EPD demonstrated in this work has the merits of foldability, disposability, environmental friendliness, low cost, and low power consumption, presenting an alternative for future application scenarios of displays.
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