Cui Nan,Song Yu,Tan Ching-Hong,Zhang Kai,Yang Xiye,Dong Sheng,Xie Boming,Huang Fei
To achieve adhesive and conformable wearable electronics, improving stretchable transparent electrode (STE) becomes an indispensable bottleneck needed to be addressed. Here, we adopt a nonuniform Young’s modulus structure with silver nanowire (AgNW) and fabricate a STE layer. This layer possesses transparency of >88% over a wide spectrum range of 400–1000 nm, sheet resistance below 20 Ω sq −1 , stretchability of up to 100%, enhanced mechanical robustness, low surface roughness, and good interfacial wettability for solution process. As a result of all these properties, the STE enables the fabrication of a highly efficient ultraflexible wearable device comprising of both organic photovoltaic (OPV) and organic photodetector (OPD) parts with high mechanical durability and conformability, for energy-harvesting and biomedical-sensing applications, respectively. This demonstrates the great potential of the integration of OPVs and OPDs, capable of harvesting energy independently for biomedical applications, paving the way to a future of independent conformable wearable OPV/OPDs for different applications.
Shoujie Shen,Qiyu Wu,Xingchao Chen,Jia Li,Xuanting Zhao,Chuao Ma,Chan Liu,Hongliang Liu
Stretchable transparent electrodes (STEs) composed of highly conductive silver nanowires (AgNWs) and mechanically stretchable polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) are compelling materials for the development of flexible electronic devices. So far, the fabrication processes of the AgNWs/PDMS-based STEs suffer from low efficiency on a small scale, apart from the limitations and challenges posed by the continuous fabrication processes that are required to exploit these fascinating materials in an industrial context. Here, we have addressed these limitations by using gradient PDMS with a tunable modulus as the stretchable substrate, on which ionic liquid-mediated aligned semi-embedded AgNWs are formed via a scalable superwettability-induced transfer strategy. We have demonstrated the importance of the gradient PDMS in achieving STEs with improved optoelectrical properties, mechanical stretchability, and long-term stability. Furthermore, we have shown the applications of the designed STEs for electro-heating and electroluminescent devices. This promising fabrication process is an industrially relevant alternative to current processes that are either complicated and less effective (for example, stamping transfer) or not compatible with continuous, large-scale production (for example, spin-coating or electrospinning).