Large-area and uniform silver nanowires based transparent electrodes on rigid and flexible substrates fabricated by polymethylmethacrylate-assisted spin-coating

摘要

In this paper, we propose a simple and full-solution polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA)-assisted spin-coating method to produce silver nanowire (Ag NW) networks on both rigid and flexible substrates as transparent electrodes. Because of the high viscosity of PMMA, Ag NWs embedded in it can be distributed uniformly over a large area. Thus, through this method, transparent electrodes with high optical transmittance (~ 0.91, better than that of a 80nm thick ITO that is typically applied to solar cells), good electrical conductivity (~ 15 Ω/sq on average, much better than that of ITO) and long-term stability have been demonstrated on 4" glass substrates, which are also better than the devices fabricated without the assistance of PMMA. This method has also been extended to flexible substrates. Good uniformity is achieved over a large area of 5 cm × 5 cm. Two simple application demonstrations indicate again the great potential of our method for mass production of Ag NW networks, which are likely to replace ITO as transparent electrodes.