Transparent Conductive Electrodes Based on Graphene-Related Materials

Abstract

Transparent conducting electrodes (TCEs) are the most important key component in photovoltaic and display technology. In particular, graphene has been considered as a viable substitute for indium tin oxide (ITO) due to its optical transparency, excellent electrical conductivity, and chemical stability. The outstanding mechanical strength of graphene also provides an opportunity to apply it as a flexible electrode in wearable electronic devices. At the early stage of the development, TCE films that were produced only with graphene or graphene oxide (GO) were mainly reported. However, since then, the hybrid structure of graphene or GO mixed with other TCE materials has been investigated to further improve TCE performance by complementing the shortcomings of each material. This review provides a summary of the fabrication technology and the performance of various TCE films prepared with graphene-related materials, including graphene that is grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and GO or reduced GO (rGO) dispersed solution and their composite with other TCE materials, such as carbon nanotubes, metal nanowires, and other conductive organic/inorganic material. Finally, several representative applications of the graphene-based TCE films are introduced, including solar cells, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), and electrochromic devices.

A Review on Graphene-Based Light Emitting Functional Devices

“…The graphene is also considered an alternative material to ITO due to excellent electrical conductively, transparency, and chemical and thermal stability [ 26 ]. Graphene and doped graphene, such as transparent electrode [ 27 ], with nanowire [ 28 ], CNTs, and SWCNTs [ 29 ], have also been studied with improved LEDs performance in term of current spreading enhancement [ 30 ] and ohmic contact formation with reduced growth temperature [ 31 ].…”

Graphene-Based Contacts for Optoelectronic Devices

“…For example, the incorporation of carbon nanotubes (CNT) [ 14 ], metal nanowires/nanogrids [ 15 , 16 ], graphene or reduced graphene oxide (rGO) [ 17 , 18 ] have already been demonstrated, showing successful results. Among them, sheet resistances of 24 Ω/sq and 83% of average transmittance have been reported by CNT-based electrodes [ 14 ], while using graphene fabricated by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), a wide range of values are found depending on the transfer techniques [ 19 ]. In all these cases, the graphene replaces the TCO commonly used.…”

Robust transparent conducting electrode based on silver nanowire coating on polyelectrolytes multilayers

“…Several materials have been proposed to replace the ITO such as metal nanowires [11][12][13][14], carbon base electrode (carbon nanotube [15,16], or graphene [17]), and hybrid material (ITO/silver nanowire [18], silver nanowire/metal mesh [19,20] or silver nanowire/ZnO nanoparticle [21][22][23]). Silver nanoparticles and more precisely Ag nanowires (AgNW) are often described as one of the most promising alternatives due to excellent electrical conductivity and high transparency [24].…”