Highly Transparent and Flexible All-Solid-State Supercapacitors Based on Ultralong Silver Nanowire Conductive Networks

Abstract

Ultralong silver nanowires (Ag NWs) are preferred for enabling transparent conductive networks with low sheet resistance, high transparency, and excellent mechanical flexibility, which offer great merits in achieving high-performance and flexible energy storage devices. Herein, a new type of polyol process was proposed for the synthesis of ultralong Ag NWs. Uniform Ag NWs with the average length of 75 μm were obtained. Transparent conductive films (TCFs) based on the as-prepared Ag NWs exhibited low sheet resistance of 15.2 Ω/sq at 84% transmittance with a negligible change in sheet resistance after bending. Flexible all-solid-state supercapacitors based on the resulting Ag NW TCFs showed high transparency (>50%), good mechanical flexibility, and high cyclic stability with only slight areal capacitance decays after 100 times of bending (∼25%) and 5000 charge-discharge cycles (∼15%). The results manifest great potentials of the resulting TCFs based on ultralong Ag NWs for flexible and wearable energy-storage applications.