One-pot synthesis of copper nanowire-graphene composite with excellent stability and electrical performance for flexible electrodes

Copper nanowires (CuNWs) endowed with oxidation stability without impairing their conductivity is highly desirable for their practical applications. This work demonstrates a green and cost-effective method to produce a stable copper nanowires-graphene nanosheets composite (CuNWs-GNs), and the electrodes based on CuNWs-GNs were fabricated. The CuNWs with a high-aspect-ratio of 1778 in-situ grown directly between the high crystalline GNs interlayers, thereby obtained a multilayer protective shield of GNs. The electrodes fabricated by a filtration method possessed high electrical conductivity of 2.77 × 106 S·m−1. The relative resistance ratio of the electrodes increased only 1.27 and 1.92, respectively, after aging at 25 ℃ and 60 ℃ for 46 days, which suggested that the electrodes had excellent oxidation stability. The transparent flexible electrodes (TFEs) fabricated on a polyethylene terephthalate sheet by a spray coating method presented an excellent transmittance of about 89% at an electrical resistance of 81.42 Ω/sq. The TFEs demonstrated impressive mechanical flexibility against 1000 bending cycles and in different radius curvature ranging from 1 mm to 30 mm. This approach sheds light on solving the big issue of the instability of CuNWs and promote their applications in a modern electronic device.