Scientists use silver nanowires to make LCD screen electrodes

The silver nanowire electrodes made by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) are flexible and highly conductive, and overcome the limitations associated with ITO.

Besides its high price, ITO has several drawbacks. It’s brittle, making it impractical for use in flexible displays and solar cells, and there is a lack of availability of indium, which is found primarily in Asia. Further, the production of ITO films is relatively inefficient.

For some time, silver nanowire (AgNW) networks have been seen as promising candidates to replace ITO, but complicated treatments have often been required to fuse crossed AgNWs to achieve low resistance and good substrate adhesion.

To address this, the UCLA researchers demonstrated that by fusing AgNWs with metal-oxide nanoparticles and organic polymers, they could efficiently produce highly transparent conductors.

Scientists can easily spray a surface with the nanowires to make a transparent mat, but the challenge is to make the silver nanowires adhere to the surface more securely without the use of extreme temperatures (200°C) or high pressures; steps that make the nanomaterials less compatible with the sensitive organic materials typically used to make flexible electronics.