Highly stretchable and conductive silver nanowire thin films formed by soldering nanomesh junctions

Abstract

Silver nanowires (AgNWs) have been widely used for stretchable and foldable conductors due to their percolating network nanostructure. To enhance the mechanical strength of AgNW thin films under extreme stretching conditions, in this study, we utilize a simple chemical reaction to join AgNW network connections. Upon applying a reactive ink over AgNW thin films, silver nanoparticles are preferentially generated over the nanowire junctions and solder the nanomesh structures. The soldered nanostructure reinforces the conducting network and exhibits no obvious change in electrical conductivity in the stretching or rolling process with elongation strains up to 120%. Several examples are also demonstrated to show potential applications of this material in stretchable electronic devices.

Stretchable Conductive Networks of Carbon Nanotubes Using Plasticized Colloidal Templates

“…Included for comparison are the 2D positions for samples allowed to fully relax after being drawn beyond failure (referred to as "broken" samples). The unstrained wavenumber for this band is seen to be near 2680 cm −1 ; this is in very good agreement with the value for as-prepared SWNT samples in the review by Eklund et al (1995). The results for both samples clearly indicate two different modes of deformation for the CNT bundles; the shift is linear up to~100% sample strain, above which the gradient of the linear fit is reduced.…”

“…Methods to improve the nanoparticle incorporation are critical to improving the functionality of stretchable composites for electronics. Techniques have included "welded" or supported junctions (Lee et al, 2013;Chen and Liao, 2014), or the use of multiple interfaces, such as the use of carbon nanotube (CNT) forests (Chun et al, 2010), or the improvement of interfacial adhesions between the matrix and the nanoparticle (Li et al, 2014). CNTs are particularly attractive as functional filler materials, and their inclusion into flexible composites has been studied extensively.…”

Coating, patterning, and transferring processes of silver nanowire for flexible display and sensing applications

“…To improve the optoelectronic performance of AgNW based TCFs, many methods have been developed to reduce the contact resistance between AgNWs, including heat annealing, 11 mechanical pressing, 12 plasmonic welding, 13 nanoscale joule heating, 14 and electrochemical reactions. 15 Moreover, as AgNW is of one-dimensional nanostructure, which would show interesting performances while they are aligned in orientations. 16 The alignment can be achieved by electrical field, 17 magnetic field, 18 flow field, surface tension, 19,20 spatially defined chemical, or physical treatment.…”

Mechanically Reinforced Skin‐Electronics with Networked Nanocomposite Elastomer

“…This efficacy is more obvious in the higher density specimen, implying that denser networked NWs resist more efficiently against crack. The denser networked NWs exhibit less change of resistance under the stretching due to the plentiful existence of NW junctions that serve as electrical paths, whereas the sparsely networked NWs are more susceptible to the strain . Figure f presents the absolute resistances during the cyclic elongations under repetitive stretching and releasing, highlighting that the resistances of the Cu NW mesh‐embedded elastomers almost recover upon releasing of the applied strains up to ≈80%.…”