Facile and High-Yield Replacement Reaction-Assisted Synthesis of Silver Dendrites by Jet for Conductive Ink

Metallic dendrites with uniform morphology, high purity, and large yield remain challenging to synthesize. In this work, single-crystalline silver (Ag) dendrites with uniform morphology, high purity, and large yield are successfully synthesized by employing single replacement reaction between aqueous silver nitrate (AgNO3) and solid copper (Cu) by jet. The combined effect of diffusion-limited aggregation and the locally oriented attachment of Ag particles is responsible for the formation of silver dendrites under nonequilibrium conditions. Finally, the potential applications of as-synthesized silver dendrites are demonstrated by successfully preparing silver-based conductive ink for flexible electronics and wearable equipment. The conductive pattern exhibits resistivity of 7.2 μΩ·cm, showing good conductivity of the prepared conductive material. This facile and time-efficient synthetic route can be extended to synthesize other noble metal nanostructures with desired morphologies by adopting selective precursor salt concentrations and substrate metals with proper redox potentials.