The energy crisis is a major challenge of the 21<sup>th</sup> century. Managing buildings’ environment in a smart way has attracted a great deal of interest to address the current energy issue because the construction sector uses as much as 30 to 40% of the primary energy in the world. Smart windows, such as those based on suspended particle devices (SPDs), provide dynamic control of photon flow that minimizes the energy loss, as well as improves human comfort. These windows are fabricated by sandwiching an electro-optically active layer between two transparent electrodes. Although significant progress has made in identifying the optimal materials for such windows, there is still a great need to improve their key elements, especially the performance of electrodes. Herein, we report a novel SPD, which was built upon copper-reduced graphene oxide (Cu-rGO) core-shell nanowire (NW) films as transparent conductive electrodes (TCEs) for the first time. The Cu NWs were firstly wrapped with GO and then deposited on glass by vacuum filtration followed by thermal annealing, leading to the TCE with both high transparency and conductivity. The sandwich-structured SPD fabricated using these new TCEs shows excellent transmittance change of 42 %, fast switching time (20 s and 40 s for color bleaching and recovery respectively) and superior stability, which are comparable to those of SPDs based on indium tin oxide electrodes. These impressive results strongly suggest the bright prospect of these novel TCEs in SPDs in particular, and further, in a wide variety of optoelectronic devices in general.

Exploration of copper-reduced graphene oxide core-shell nanowire films as transparent electrodes for high-performance suspended particle devices

256th National Meeting (2018)

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