Dong Jianjin, Goldthorpe Irene A
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada. Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.
Nanotechnology. 2018 Jan 26;29(4):045705. doi: 10.1088/1361-6528/aa9ab2.
Transparent electrodes such as indium tin oxide and random meshes of silver nanowires (AgNWs) have isotropic in-plane properties. However, we show that imparting some alignment to AgNWs can create anisotropic transparency and electrical conductivity characteristics that may benefit many applications. For example, liquid crystal displays and the touch sensors on top of them often only need to be transparent to one type of polarized light as well as predominantly conductive in only one direction. Herein, AgNWs are slightly preferentially aligned during their deposition by rod coating. Compared to randomly oriented AgNW films, the alignment boosts the transparency to perpendicularly polarized light, as well as achieves a higher transparency for a given sheet resistance in one direction compared to randomly oriented AgNWs films. These factors together increase the transparency of a 16 Ω/sq electrode by 7.3 percentage points. The alignment technique is cheap and scalable, compatible with roll-to-roll processes, and most importantly does not require extra processing steps, as rod coating is already a standard process for AgNW electrode fabrication.
诸如氧化铟锡和银纳米线（AgNWs）的随机网格等透明电极具有各向同性的面内特性。然而，我们表明，使AgNWs具有一定的取向可以产生各向异性的透明度和电导率特性，这可能有利于许多应用。例如，液晶显示器及其顶部的触摸传感器通常只需要对一种类型的偏振光透明，并且在仅一个方向上具有主要的导电性。在此，通过棒涂法在AgNWs沉积过程中使其略有优先取向。与随机取向的AgNW薄膜相比，这种取向提高了对垂直偏振光的透明度，并且与随机取向的AgNW薄膜相比，在一个方向上对于给定的方阻实现了更高的透明度。这些因素共同使16Ω/sq电极的透明度提高了7.3个百分点。这种取向技术成本低廉且可扩展，与卷对卷工艺兼容，最重要的是不需要额外的加工步骤，因为棒涂法已经是制造AgNW电极的标准工艺。
