Purification of Copper Nanowires To Prepare Flexible Transparent Conductive Films with High Performance

Copper nanowire (Cu NW) films have been widely studied due to their potential applications in optoelectronic devices, but there are rare reports of high-performance NW films without nanoparticles (NPs). In this paper, a water-hydrophobic organic solvent system was used to efficiently separate NPs from NWs. As a result, the transmittance of the purified Cu NW/PET films improved approximately 3% compared with the unpurified Cu NW/PET films at a given sheet resistance. And the high-quality Cu NW/PET films have a transmittance of 97.61% at 102.9 Ω sq–1. A detailed mechanism of purification is also proposed. This facile purification method is highly efficient and widely applicable to improve the performance of flexible transparent conductive films, which will meet the need of commercial applications of NW films with excellent optoelectronic performance.