Silver nanowires (AgNWs) utilized for fabricating flexible transparent conducting films (FTCFs) for flexible electronics and transparent heaters have attracted significant attention for their excellent mechanical, optical, thermal, and electrical properties.

Its excellent conductivity makes AgNW has potential applications on transparent conducting film and electrode of electrochemical capacitor.

AgNW has excellent conductivity, high transparency, and good mechanical properties, those make it better than carbon nanotube and graphene on transparent conducting film and electrode of electrochemical capacitor.

In application, a sandwich-structured bottom hard-coat/silver nanowire/top hard-coat (BHC/AgNW/THC) transparent conductive film (TCF) has been prepared by embedding the functional AgNW layer between two HC layers. The BHC/AgNW/THC TCFs show high scratch resistance with a hardness of 3H due to the enhanced adhesion to the substrate.

Hard coating has little effect on the flexibility of AgNW films especially under extreme bending conditions and negligible resistance change could be observed after bending over thousands of times. Consequently, the greatly improved performance of BHC/AgNW/THC TCFs provided by employing hard coating layers paves the way for real-world applications of flexible AgNWs in vast areas that rigid indium tin oxide is not suitable.

Transparent conductive films are mainly utilized in touch panel and could play a key role in the display market in a near future.