Fabrication of flexible conductive composites based on copper nanowires

This work describes an electrical conductive composite based on copper nanowires (CuNWs) and flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate. The CuNWs with average diameter and length of ~150 nm and ~20 μm were fabricated by a simple hydrothermal method. There is a face centered cubic (fcc) crystal structure of the as-prepared CuNWs confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) data. The CuNWs were well dispersed in a formulated ink and printed on a glass sheet by blade coating to investigate the electrical conductivity under different annealing temperature. The flexible conductive composites were prepared via vacuum filtrating and transfer printing the CuNWs to flexible PDMS substrate and they exhibited low electrical resistances.