Simple and Cost Effective Fabrication Process for Making Flexible Transparent Electrodes

Metal mesh is a more preferable kind of transparent electrode materials due to its impressive optoelectronic properties. However, the fabrication process involve complicated and high-cost patterning techniques.

A cost-efficient and facile fabrication process, namely as electrochemical replication and transfer (ERT), is developed to produce the metal mesh-based flexible transparent electrodes (FTEs).The key innovation of ERT method is the adoption of a reusable Au-mesh template to realize high-quality metallic patterns by low-cost solution process. This bottom-up process only consists of two facile steps, where is vacuum free, resist free and etching free. Furthermore, as-made embedded metal mesh-based FTEs show remarkable electro-optical performances. Particularly, the figure of merit soars up to 25,000, which is one new record while compared with previous transparent electrodes.

Considering the cost-efficient, facile and scalable fabrication and excellent properties, we believe our ERT fabrication strategy could effectively promote widely practical application of metal mesh in flexible and wearable optoelectronic devices, such as organic light-emitting diodes, solar cells, touch screen panels, transparent heaters, photodetectors, human-machine interaction apparatus,etc