ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2015 Aug 05;7(30):16760-6. doi: 10.1021/acsami.5b04522. Epub 2015 Jul 23.

Copper Nanowires as Conductive Ink for Low-Cost Draw-On Electronics.

ACS applied materials & interfaces

Naveen Noah Jason, Wei Shen, Wenlong Cheng

PMID: 26161620 DOI: 10.1021/acsami.5b04522

Abstract

This work tackles the complicated problem of clump formation and entanglement of high aspect ratio copper nanowires, due to which a well dispersed solution for use as a true ink for drawable electronics has not been made until now. Through rheology studies even a hard to use material like copper nanowires was tailored to be made into a highly efficient conductive ink with only 2 vol % or 18.28 wt % loading which is far lower than existing nanoparticle based inks. This versatile ink can be applied onto various substrates such as paper, PET, PDMS and latex. By using the ink in a roller ball pen, a bending sensor device was simply drawn on paper, which demonstrated detection of various degrees of convex bending and was highly durable as shown in the 10,000 bending cycling test. A highly sensitive strain sensor which has a maximum gauge factor of 54.38 was also fabricated by simply painting the ink onto latex rubber strip using a paintbrush. Finally a complex conductive pattern depicting the Sydney Opera House was painted on paper to demonstrate the versatility and robustness of the ink. The use of Cu NWs is highly economical in terms of the conductive filler loading in the ink and the cost of copper itself as compared to other metal NPs, CNT, and graphene-based inks. The demonstrated e-ink, devices, and facile device fabrication methods push the field one step closer to truly creating cheap and highly reliable skin like devices "on the fly".

Keywords: bending sensor; conductive ink; copper nanowires; draw-on electronics; strain sensor

Publication Types

• Journal Article
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't