Copper nanowire (Cu NW) is a promising electrode material researched in various applications, such as low-cost flexible displays, lighting, touch screen and solar cells. More importantly, the Cu NWs have a potential to replace the indium tin oxide (ITO) and silver nanowires in the future, because of the low cost, excellent electrical conductivity and remarkable mechanical properties. Recently, there are several methods to synthesis of Cu NWs. However, these Cu NWs are limited to use for practical applications, due to the oxidation and high sintering temperature.Herein, we synthesized the average 93 nm diameter, ~30 �m length single crystalline Cu NWs by using polyol reduction method with excellent oxidation stability, well dispersibility, low-sintering temperature and high conductivity. This synthesis method depends on the reduction potential of ethylene glycol (EG) with surfactant of oleylamine and potassium bromide (KBr) which could control the morphology of metal nanowires. Through the observation of X-ray diffraction (XRD), Transmission electron microscope (TEM) and Scanning electron microscope (SEM), we demonstrated a mechanism of the formation and confirmed the optimized synthesis conditions. To analyze the oxidation stability, we observed the change of the Cu NWs within 7 days after synthesis using XRD, Ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). From these analyses, we can observe that there is no characteristic change for Cu NWs during 7 days.We applied the Cu NWs for foldable and flexible electrodes. The performance of electrodes was measured by bending machine and four point probe. Experimental data demonstrated that these Cu NWs have the high conductivity (0.5O/?) and excellent flexible property after annealing 180 �C in the vacuum oven. We believed that our synthesis method could be adapted to fabricate the functionalized electrodes and will be used for the next generation electronics.

Synthesis of oxidation stable Cu nanowires with high performances for future electrodes

247th National Meeting (2014)

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