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High-resolution and large-size stretchable electrodes based on patterned silver nanowires composites

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Abstract

Electrodes based on composites of silver nanowires (AgNWs) and elastic polymers have been widely studied and applied in various stretchable electronic devices. However, due to the high aspect ratio of nanowires, the patterning of AgNW-based composite electrodes remains a huge challenge, especially for high-resolution complex circuit wiring on large-size elastic substrates. In this paper, we propose a method for preparing large-size stretchable circuit boards with high-resolution electrodes by the combination of screen printing and vacuum filtration of AgNWs/polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) composite. The as-prepared stretchable electrodes have smooth edges with patterning resolution up to ∼50 µm. The conductivity of the composite electrode can be precisely controlled by varying deposition densities of AgNWs and have reached to 1.07 × 104 S/cm when the deposition density was 2.0 mg/cm2. In addition, the uniformity of conductivity and the resistance-strain characteristics of composite electrodes were systematically evaluated with different AgNWs deposition densities. The composite electrodes have been successfully employed to construct a large-size programmable display system and an 18-channel surface electromyography (EMG) recording, showing great potentials for some strain-insensitive stretchable circuits in wearable and health-related electronic applications.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2017YFE0112000) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 51603227).

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  1. Yong Lin and Qingsong Li contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Printable Electronics Research Centre, Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Yong Lin, Chen Ding, Jiayi Wang, Wei Yuan, Wenming Su & Zheng Cui

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Intelligence-Synergy Systems, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Qingsong Li & Zhiyuan Liu

  3. School of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Jiayi Wang

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  1. Yong Lin
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  2. Qingsong Li
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  5. Wei Yuan
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Correspondence to Wei Yuan or Zheng Cui.

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Lin, Y., Li, Q., Ding, C. et al. High-resolution and large-size stretchable electrodes based on patterned silver nanowires composites. Nano Res. 15, 4590–4598 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4088-x

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