Wrinkled Graphene–AgNWs Hybrid Electrodes for Smart Window

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing demand for stretchable electrodes for flexible and soft electronic devices. An electrode in such devices requires special functionalities to be twisted, bent, stretched, and deformed into variable shapes and also will need to have the capacity to be restored to the original state. In this study, we report uni- or bi-axially wrinkled graphene–silver nanowire hybrid electrodes comprised of chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-grown graphene and silver nanowires. A CVD-grown graphene on a Cu-foil was transferred onto a biaxially pre-strained elastomer substrate and silver nanowires were sprayed on the transferred graphene surface. The pre-strained film was relaxed uni-(or bi-)axially to produce a wrinkled structure. The bi-axially wrinkled graphene and silver nanowires hybrid electrodes were very suitable for high actuating performance of electro-active dielectric elastomers compared with the wrinkle-free case. Present results show that the optical transparency of the highly stretchable electrode can be successfully tuned by modulating input voltages.

Keywords

• graphene
• silver-nanowires
• wrinkles
• elastomer actuators
• tunable transparency