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Acid treatment of silver flake coatings and its application in the flexible electrical circuits

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Abstract

This work reports the preparation of a highly-conductive silver coating using silver micro flakes via a facile method of acid treatments. In this method, micron-sized silver flakes, suspended in isopropanol alcohol at 1 wt%, were deposited on polypropylene substrates, forming a silver coating with a surface coverage of ~7 × 10−10 g/m2. This coating was initially non-conductive. It was found that through a simple acid treatment by either immersing the coating in HCl solutions or exposing the coating to HCl vapors for a brief period <30 min, the conductivity of the coating could be improved dramatically, reaching a conductivity as high as ~3.8 × 104 S/cm. To investigate the mechanism, different solutions (acid, alkali and salts) were tested. The results indicated that both the Cl− and H+ ions were responsible for the increased conductivity, likely by partially replacing or removing the lubricant layers coated on the silver flakes. Furthermore, we applied this method to fabricate flexible electrical circuits by embedding silver patterns in plastic sheets or polydimethylsiloxane elastomers. The resultant circuits were conductive and bendable without losing conductivity, showing a good potential application in soft electronics.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) and the research funds from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through a Discovery grant program. We thank Behnam Meschi Amoli and Hamed Shahsavan at the University of Waterloo for their constructive discussion and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150000, China

    Shaofan Sun & Yudong Huang

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Shaofan Sun, Zihe Pan, Wei Zhang, Fut K. Yang & Boxin Zhao

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  1. Shaofan Sun
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  2. Zihe Pan
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  3. Wei Zhang
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Correspondence to Yudong Huang or Boxin Zhao.

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Sun, S., Pan, Z., Zhang, W. et al. Acid treatment of silver flake coatings and its application in the flexible electrical circuits. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 27, 4363–4371 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-016-4305-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-016-4305-z

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