Highly Conductive Fractal-structured Silver Particles for Preparing Flexible Printed Circuits via Screen Printing

摘要

Fractal-structured silver particles(FSSPs)are conductive materials with a micron-scale trunk and nanoscale branches,and are characterized with high electrical conductivity and high connectivity.In this study,FSSPs were added to an aqueous additive solution for synthesizing a conductive ink,which was used to prepare two types of printing electrodes via screen printing.The first type included two flexible printed electrodes(FPEs):an FPE on a polyethylene terephthalate(PET)film and an FPE on paper.The second one was a polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS)-embedded FPE.The PETbased FPE exhibited high electrochemical stability when its sheet resistance was 0.38Ω/sq for a 50%(w/w)content of FSSPs in the prepared conductive ink.Moreover,the embedded FPE demonstrated excellent mechanical properties and high chemical stability.In addition,the embedded structure was endowed with stretchability,which is important for different devices,such as flexible biomedical sensors and flexible electronics.