Stretchable transparent electrodes for conformable wearable organic photovoltaic devices

• Published in: Npj flexible electronics 2021-11, Vol.5 (1), p.1-8, Article 31
• Main Authors: Cui, Nan, Song, Yu, Tan, Ching-Hong, Zhang, Kai, Yang, Xiye, Dong, Sheng, Xie, Boming, Huang, Fei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/301/299/946; 639/301/923/3931; 639/4077/4072; 639/925/927/511; Biomedical materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Electronics and Microelectronics; Energy harvesting; Instrumentation; Materials Science; Modulus of elasticity; Nanowires; Optical and Electronic Materials; Photovoltaic cells; Polymer Sciences; Stretchability; Surface roughness; Wearable technology; Wettability
• ISSN: 2397-4621; 2397-4621
• DOI: 10.1038/s41528-021-00127-7

To achieve adhesive and conformable wearable electronics, improving stretchable transparent electrode (STE) becomes an indispensable bottleneck needed to be addressed. Here, we adopt a nonuniform Young’s modulus structure with silver nanowire (AgNW) and fabricate a STE layer. This layer possesses transparency of >88% over a wide spectrum range of 400–1000 nm, sheet resistance below 20 Ω sq −1 , stretchability of up to 100%, enhanced mechanical robustness, low surface roughness, and good interfacial wettability for solution process. As a result of all these properties, the STE enables the fabrication of a highly efficient ultraflexible wearable device comprising of both organic photovoltaic (OPV) and organic photodetector (OPD) parts with high mechanical durability and conformability, for energy-harvesting and biomedical-sensing applications, respectively. This demonstrates the great potential of the integration of OPVs and OPDs, capable of harvesting energy independently for biomedical applications, paving the way to a future of independent conformable wearable OPV/OPDs for different applications.