• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.17-17
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• 2009

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have attracted much attention as promising materials for transparent conducting films (TCFs), thanks to their superior electrical conductivity, high mechanical strength, and complete flexibility. The CNT-based TCFs can be used in a variety of application fields as flexible, transparent electrodes, including touch panel screens, flexible electronics, transparent heaters, etc. First of all, this study investigated the effect of a variety of surfactants on the dispersion of SWCNTs in an aqueous solution. Following the optimization of the dispersion by surfactants, flexible TCFs were fabricated by spraying the CNT suspension onto poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) substrates. The sheet resistances of the TCFs having different surfactants were investigated with treatment in nitric acid ($HNO_3$) whose concentration and period of treatment time were varied. It seems that the $HNO_3$ removes the surfactants from and is simultaneously doped into the SWCNT network, reducing the contact resistance between CNTs. TCFs were characterized by UV-VIS spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and four-point probe.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.254-254
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• 2009

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have attracted much attention as promising materials for transparent conducting films (TCFs), thanks to their superior electrical conductivity, high mechanical strength, and complete flexibility. The CNT-based TCFs can be used in a variety of application fields as flexible, transparent electrodes, including touch panel screens, flexible electronics, transparent heaters, etc. First of all, this study investigated the effect of a variety of surfactants on the dispersion of SWCNTs in an aqueous solution. Following the optimization of the dispersion by surfactants, flexible TCFs were fabricated by spraying the CNT suspension onto poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) substrates. The sheet resistances of the TCFs having different surfactants were investigated with treatment in nitric acid ($HNO_3$) whose concentration and period of treatment time were varied. It seems that the $HNO_3$ removes the surfactants from and is simultaneously doped into the SWCNT network, reducing the contact resistance between CNTs. TCFs were characterized by UV-VIS spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and four-point probe.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.417-417
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• 2009

Although a transparent conductive film (TCF) belongs to essential supporting materials for many device applications such as touch screens, flat panel displays, and sensors, a conventional transparent conductive material, indium-tin oxide (ITO), suffers from considerable drawback because the price of indium has soared since 2001. Despite a recent falloff, a demand of ITO is expected to increase sharply in the future due to the trend of flat panel display technologies toward flexible, paper-like features. There have been recently extensive studies to replace ITO with new materials, in particular, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) since CNTs possess excellent properties such as flexibility, electrical conductivity, optical transparency, mechanical strength, etc., which are prerequisite to TCFs. This study fabricated TCFs with single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) produced by arc discharge. The SWCNTs were dispersed in water with a surfactant of sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (NaDDBS) under sonication. Carbon black and fullerene nanoparticles were added to the SWCNT-dispersed solution to enhance contact resistance between CNTs. TCFs were manufactured by a filtration and transfer method. TCFs added with carbon black and fullerene nanoparticles were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), UV-vis spectroscopy (optical transmittance), and four-point probe measurement (sheet resistance).

• Journal of the Korean institute of surface engineering
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.323-330
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• 2016

The flexible transparent conducting films (TCFs) are required to realize flexible optoelectronic devices. 1D nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), metal nanowires are good candidates to replace indium tin oxide that is currently used to fabricate transparent electrode. Particularly, silver nanowires are used to produce flexible TCFs. In this review, we introduce TCF technologies based on silver nanowires/CNTs hybrid structures. CNTs can compromise drawbacks of silver nanowires for applications in high performance TCFs for optoelectronic devices.

• Carbon letters
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.255-258
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• 2013

Flexible transparent conducting films (TCFs) were fabricated by dip-coating single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) onto a flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film. The amount of coated SWCNTs was controlled simply by dipping number. Because the performance of SWCNT-based TCFs is influenced by both electrical conductance and optical transmittance, we evaluated the film performance by introducing a film property factor using both the number of interconnected SWCNT bundles at intersection points, and the coverage of SWCNTs on the PET substrate, in field emission scanning electron microscopic images. The microscopic film property factor was in an excellent agreement with the macroscopic one determined from electrical conductance and optical transmittance measurements, especially for a small number of dippings. Therefore, the most crucial factor governing the performance of the SWCNT-based TCFs is a SWCNT-network structure with a large number of intersection points for a minimum amount of deposited SWCNTs.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.56-56
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• 2010

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have attracted much attention as a promising material for transparent conducting films (TCFs), due to their superior electrical conductivity, high mechanical strength, and complete flexibility as well as their one-dimensional morphological features of extremely high length-to-diameter ratios. This study investigated three kinds of SWCNTs with different purities: as-produced SWCNTs (AP-SWCNTs), thermally purified SWCNTs (TH-SWCNTs), thermally and acid purified SWCNTs (TA-SWCNTs). The purity of each SWCNT sample was assessed by considering absorption peaks in the semiconducting ($S_{22}$) and metallic ($M_{11}$) tubes with UV-Vis NIR spectroscopy and a metal content with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The purity increased as proceeding the purification stages from the AP-SWCNTs through the thermal purification to the acid purification. The samples containing different contents of SWCNTs were dispersed in water using sodium dodecyl benzensulfate (SDBS). Aqueous suspensions of different purities of SWCNTs were prepared to have similar absorbances in UV-Vis absorption measurements so that one can make the TCFs possess similar optical transmittances irrespective of the SWCNT purity. Transparent conductive SWCNT networks were formed by spraying an SWCNT suspension onto a poly(ethyleneterephthalate) (PET) substrate. As expected, the TCFs fabricated with AP-SWCNTs showed very high sheet resistances. Interestingly, the TH-SWCNTs gave lower sheet resistances to the TFCs than the TA-SWCNTs although the latter was of higher purity in the SWCNT content than the former. The TA-SWCNTs would be shortened in length and be more bundled by the acid purification, relative to the TH-SWCNTs. For both purified (TH, TA) samples, the subsequent nitric acid ($HNO_3$) treatment greatly lowered the sheet resistances of the TCFs, but almost eliminated the difference of sheet resistances between them. This seems to be because the electrical conductivity increased not only due to further removal of surfactants but also due to p-type doping upon the acid treatment. The doping effect was likely to overwhelm the effect of surfactant removal. Although the nitric acid treatment resulted in the similar. electrical properties to the two samples, the TCFs of TH-SWCNTs showed much lower sheet resistances than those of the TA-SWCNTs prior to the acid treatment.

• Proceedings of the Materials Research Society of Korea Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.111.1-111.1
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• 2012

Interest in flexible transparent conducting films (TCFs) has been growing recently mainly due to the demand for electrodes incorporated in flexible or wearable displays in the future. Indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films, which have been traditionally used as the TCFs, have a serious obstacle in TCFs applications. SWNTs are the most appropriate materials for conductive films for displays due to their excellent high mechanical strength and electrical conductivity. In this work, the fabrication by the spraying process of transparent SWNT films and reduction of its sheet resistance on PET substrates is researched Arc-discharge SWNTs were dispersed in deionized water by adding sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as surfactant and sonicated, followed by the centrifugation. The dispersed SWNT was spray-coated on PET substrate and dried on a hotplate. When the spray process was terminated, the TCF was immersed into deionized water to remove the surfactant and then it was dried on hotplate. The TCF film was then was doped with Au-ionic doping treatment, rinsed with deionized water and dried. The surface morphology of TCF was characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy. The sheet resistance and optical transmission properties of the TCF were measured with a four-point probe method and a UV-visible spectrometry, respectively. This was confirmed and discussed on the XPS and UPS studies. We show that 87 ${\Omega}/{\Box}$ sheet resistances with 81% transmittance at the wavelength of 550nm. The changes in electrical and optical conductivity of SWNT film before and after Au-ionic doping treatments were discussed. The effect of Au-ion treatment on the electronic structure change of SWNT films was investigated by Raman and XPS.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.07b
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• pp.1480-1483
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• 2005

Transparent thin composite films (TCFs) were deposited on OLED devices by means of RF sputtering method and their passivation-properties were evaluated by comparing to the e-beam evaporating method. This composite film formed by mixed ratio of MgO (3wt %): $SiO_2$ (1wt %) was developed from pallet as a source of e-beam evaporator to 6-inch size target for sputtering in order to apply for large-sized organic display devices. Water Vapor Transmission Rates (WVTR) of the deposited films were measured as a function of thickness to assess the effectiveness of this film as a passivation layer and it applied to real devices. From this study, we can confirm that the passivation layer formed by TCFs using RF sputtering method sufficiently shows the potentiality of application to passivation layer for organic display devices.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.55-60
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• 2018

Transparent conductive thin films (TCFs) are essential materials for solar cells, organic light-emitting diodes, and display panels. Indium tin oxide (ITO) is one of the most widely used commercial materials to create TCFs'; however, new materials that can possibly replace ITO at a lower cost and/or those possessing mechanical flexibility are urgently needed. Silver nanowire (AgNW) is one of those promising materials, as it is less expensive and possesses superior mechanical flexibility as compared to ITO. We used AgNW and sol-gel ZnO to fabricate composite thin films by spray coating. We propose two spray-coating methods: the 'metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD)/AgNW' method and the Mixture method. These two methods are expected to be commercialized for high-quality and low-cost products, respectively.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.434-434
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• 2012

Despite recent efforts for fabricating flexible transparent conducting films (TCFs) with low resistance and high transmittance, several obstacles to meet the requirement of flexible displays still remain. Indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films, which have been traditionally used as the TCFs, have a serious obstacle in TCFs applications. SWNTs are the most appropriate materials for conductive films for displays due to their excellent high mechanical strength and electrical conductivity. Recently, it has been demonstrated that acid treatment is an efficient method for surfactant removal. However, the treatment has been reported to destroy most SWNT. In this work, the fabrication by the spraying process of transparent SWNT films and reduction of its sheet resistance by Au-ionic doping treatment on PET substrates is researched. Arc-discharge SWNTs were dispersed in deionized water by adding sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as surfactant and sonicated, followed by the centrifugation. The dispersed SWNT was spray-coated on PET substrate and dried on a hotplate. When the spray process was terminated, the TCF was immersed into deionized water to remove the surfactant and then it was dried on hotplate. The TCF film was then was doped with Au-ionic doping treatment, rinsed with deionized water and dried. The surface morphology of TCF was characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy. The sheet resistance and optical transmission properties of the TCF were measured with a four-point probe method and a UV-visible spectrometry, respectively. This was confirmed and discussed on the XPS and UPS studies. We show that 87 ${\Omega}/{\Box}$ sheet resistances with 81% transmittance at the wavelength of 550 nm. The changes in electrical and optical conductivity of SWNT film before and after Au-ionic doping treatments were discussed. The effects of hole transport interface layer using Au-ionic doping SWNT on the performance of organic solar cells were investigated.