Low cost fabrication of flexible transparent electrodes using copper nanowires

Copper nanowires have been successfully applied to produce flexible transparent electrodes with excellent performance. The techniques for the fabrication of electrodes commonly use nitrocellulose-based ink as the coating solvent. However, this ink is expensive, contains many toxic chemicals, and requires expensive equipment, such as plasma cleaners, furnace tubes, etc. for post-treatment. In this study, we demonstrate an approach using polyvinylpyrrolidone-based ink for successful fabrication of high quality copper nanowire based transparent electrodes. When compared to the nitrocellulose-base ink, this ink is 2.5 times less expensive, simple to synthesize and requires only an oven and glacial acetic acid for post-treatment. The results showed that the copper nanowire based transparent electrodes produced using our ink exhibited equivalent performance to the ones fabricated by applying the nitrocellulose-based ink. Several experiments were carried out to fully understand and optimize our approach.