Improved performance of transparent silver nanowire electrodes by adding carbon nanotubes

We present an easy and scalable production method for transparent electrodes based on silver nanowires and silver nanowire/single-wall carbon nanotube hybrid films. We applied dip coating on glass and flexible polyethylene terephtalate foils. The foils were treated with oxygen plasma in order to increase the hydrophilicity of the surface. After the plasma treatment, the foils could be wet-coated as easy and fast as the glass substrates. Several silver nanowire films were coated with two different carbon nanotube inks. Hereby, the carbon nanotubes are supposed to function as an electrical bridge between the silver nanowires in order to decrease the sheet resistance. We found that shorter metallic enriched carbon nanotubes contributed a stronger increase on the conductivity than longer unsorted carbon nanotubes. This result for silver/carbon nanotube hybrid films is opposed to the trends for pure carbon nanotube networks, where the length of the carbon nanotubes has a stronger effect compared to the amount of metallic carbon nanotubes.