Nanomaterials (Aug 2016)

Flexible Textile-Based Organic Transistors Using Graphene/Ag Nanoparticle Electrode

  • Youn Kim,
  • Yeon Ju Kwon,
  • Kang Eun Lee,
  • Youngseok Oh,
  • Moon-Kwang Um,
  • Dong Gi Seong,
  • Jea Uk Lee

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/nano6080147
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 8
p. 147

Abstract

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Highly flexible and electrically-conductive multifunctional textiles are desirable for use in wearable electronic applications. In this study, we fabricated multifunctional textile composites by vacuum filtration and wet-transfer of graphene oxide films on a flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) textile in association with embedding Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) to improve the electrical conductivity. A flexible organic transistor can be developed by direct transfer of a dielectric/semiconducting double layer on the graphene/AgNP textile composite, where the textile composite was used as both flexible substrate and conductive gate electrode. The thermal treatment of a textile-based transistor enhanced the electrical performance (mobility = 7.2 cm2·V−1·s−1, on/off current ratio = 4 × 105, and threshold voltage = −1.1 V) due to the improvement of interfacial properties between the conductive textile electrode and the ion-gel dielectric layer. Furthermore, the textile transistors exhibited highly stable device performance under extended bending conditions (with a bending radius down to 3 mm and repeated tests over 1000 cycles). We believe that our simple methods for the fabrication of graphene/AgNP textile composite for use in textile-type transistors can potentially be applied to the development of flexible large-area electronic clothes.

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