High-performance and tailored honeycombed Ag nanowire networks fabricated by a novel electrospray assisted etching process

The rapidly growing demand in wearable electronics has led to the development of transparent flexible conductive electrodes (TFEs) that feature excellent optoelectronic properties. Herein, a facile, eco-friendly and cost-effective strategy of electrospray assisted etching (ESAE) process is presented to fabricate honeycomb-like porous Ag nanowires (NWs) networks. A water-soluble silk fibroin (SF) film served as the mask layer to pattern the Ag NWs networks, on which quasi-periodical distributed holes were simply and spontaneously achieved by electrospraying water droplets to dissolve the SF film. The scale features of the dissolved holes could be adjusted by varying the electrospray parameters, leading to tailored Ag NW networks and customizable figure of merit (FOM). It was found that the quasi-periodic deposition of droplets was assisted by electric field forces. Compared with the fully-coated networks, the optimized porous networks had a well-controlled roughness, improved transmittance of 92.5%, well-maintained conductivity (29 Ω/sq) and excellent mechanical stability, resulting in 9.3% increase in FOM, and could be further customized according to the practical photoelectric demand. The conductivity dropped by only 4.9% after 10,000 bending cycles at a bending radius of 5 mm, demonstrating the good mechanical stability of the honeycomb structures. The simple and nontoxic ESAE process offers an ideal strategy for realizing the trade-off between transmittance and sheet resistance for different optoelectronic applications. Moreover, this strategy has universal scope and would be feasible for large area manufacturing.