Highly conductive and smooth surfaced flexible transparent conductive electrode based on silver nanowires

Highlights: • Hot pressed Silver nanowire (AgNW) on Metal mesh (MM) electrode was prepared. • Hot pressed AgNW/MM/PET electrode exhibited low surface roughness of 8 nm. • Hot pressed AgNW/MM/PET exhibits 0.668 Ω/sq. with 91.25% of transmittance. • Hot pressed AgNW/MM/PET electrode was reliable in bending and taping test. -- Abstract: Silver nanowires (AgNWs) based conductive electrode have shown potential for use in large area flexible optoelectronic applications. Presently, considerable efforts are being made to lower the surface roughness and enhance the opto-electrical performance of AgNWs based transparent conductive electrode(TCE) for optoelectronic application, which require a smooth surface for high efficiency performance. In this work, we designed a hybrid metal electrode with low surface roughness fabricated by coating an AgNWs onto a metal mesh on Polyethylene terephthalate substrate (AgNW/MM/PET). The AgNW/MM/PET TCE, fabricated by a method of hot pressing after wire wound-rod coating process, exhibits a low surface roughness of 8 nm and 16.33 nm of maximum peak-to-valley value with the low sheet resistance of 0.668 Ω/sq. and a high optical transmittance of 91.25% at λ = 550 nm. In addition, the hot pressed AgNW/MM/PET TCE shows excellent mechanical stability along with long-term reliability in bending tests and strong adhesion in taping test, compared to the annealed AgNW/MM/PET TCE. Therefore, the hot pressed AgNW/MM/PET electrodes with low surface roughness and high opto-electrical performance could be a potential candidate to replace indium doped tin oxide electrodes in flexible electronic application.