Fabrication of a Highly Flexible and Affordable Transparent Electrode By Aligned U-Shaped Copper Nanowires Using a New Electrospinning Collector with Convenient Transferability

[Image: see text] By making aligned and suspended copper nanowires, a high performance, transferable, and flexible transparent electrode is reported. Indium tin oxide is often used in devices such as displays, solar cells, and touchscreens that require transparent and conductive plates. Because of problems such as brittleness, high cost, and environmental effects, this material is facing rivals, the most serious of which are metallic nanowire meshes, especially copper. We developed a simple technique which uses a U-shaped collector in the electrospinning process with three advantages including the enhancement of the figure of merit (which is related to the surface resistance R(s) and the transmittance T) by about five times (about T = 90% and R(s) = 5 Ω/□, respectively), solving the transfer problem of the nanowire metal mesh after production, and producing aligned metal nanowires for special applications. In this work, T and R(s) of aligned copper nanowires were both measured and calculated, which are consistent with each other, and also, the mentioned results were compared with the work of others.