Facile post treatment of ag nanowire/polymer composites for flexible transparent electrodes and thin film heaters

Abstract

Typical polyol-based synthesis of silver nanowire employs insulating polymer as a surfac-tant for the silver nanowire growth, which limits direct contact between each nanowire and thus its optoelectronic properties. We herein demonstrate that a simple solvent treatment effectively removes the insulating polymer around Ag NWs, leading to significantly decreased sheet resistance (~12 Ω/sq) with an increased transmittance (81% @ T550), as compared to other post-treatments. We successfully demonstrate the transparent film heaters using the solvent-treated Ag NWs network, which rap-idly exhibited 150 °C under a bias of 5 V. Flexible film heaters on plastic substrate is also demon-strated, suggesting a great potential of the solvent treatment process of Ag NWs for flexible transparent electrode and film heater applications.