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Indium tin oxide nanowires manufactured via printing and laser irradiation

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-09-18, 13:23 authored by Jack McGhee, Athanasios GoulasAthanasios Goulas, Darren SoutheeDarren Southee, Jagdeep Sagu, Daniel EngstromDaniel Engstrom, Jing Wang, David HuttDavid Hutt, Peter Evans, Zhaoxia ZhouZhaoxia Zhou, Upul Wijayantha-Kahagala-Gamage, Paul ConwayPaul Conway, Claire Carmalt
Metallic and semiconductor nanowires can provide dramatically increased electrical and optical properties in a wide range of fields, ranging from photovoltaics to sensors and catalysts. In this research, a rapid manufacturing process has been developed for printing indium tin oxide microparticles and converting them into nanowires. Microparticle indium tin oxide (ITO) inks were formulated and printed. These were then converted into hierarchical nanowire films via laser irradiation (980nm, NIR) with raster speeds of 40 mm s-1 in air, much faster compared to traditional manufacturing processes. For a 4 cm2 film, only 40 seconds of processing were required. A full materials characterization was performed on the materials pre and post laser processing with the most probable conversion mechanism found to be a laser induced carbothermal reduction process. Microstructural, chemical, and crystallographic evidence of the laser induced carbothermal reduction process were derived from SEM, XRD, XPS and TEM analysis. Compared to conventionally heat-treated printed samples, laser processing was found to increase the conductivity of the printed ITO from 0.88% to 40.47% bulk conductivity. This research demonstrates the ability of printing and laser processing to form nanowires in a high-speed manufacturing context, thereby enabling the development of printed non-transparent ITO nanowire electronics and devices.

Funding

Sustainable Manufacturing of Transparent Conducting Oxide (TCO) Inks and Thin Films

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

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History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
  • Design and Creative Arts
  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
  • Science

Department

  • Chemistry
  • Design
  • Materials

Published in

Applied Materials Today

Volume

21

Publisher

Elsevier Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2020-09-15

Publication date

2020-09-21

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

2352-9407

Language

  • en

Depositor

Jack McGhee. Deposit date: 17 September 2020

Article number

100835