Silver Nanowire Embedded Colorless Polyimide Heater for Wearable Chemical Sensors: Improved Reversible Reaction Kinetics of Optically Reduced Graphene Oxide

Abstract

Optically reduced graphene oxide (ORGO) sheets are successfully integrated on silver nanowire (Ag NW)‐embedded transparent and flexible substrate. As a heating element, Ag NWs are embedded in a colorless polyimide (CPI) film by covering Ag NW networks using polyamic acid and subsequent imidization. Graphene oxide dispersed aqueous solution is drop‐coated on the Ag NW‐embedded CPI (Ag NW‐CPI) film and directly irradiated by intense pulsed light to obtain ORGO sheets. The heat generation property of Ag NW‐CPI film is investigated by applying DC voltage, which demonstrates unprecedentedly reliable and stable characteristics even in dynamic bending condition. To demonstrate the potential application in wearable chemical sensors, NO 2 sensing characteristic of ORGO is investigated with respect to the different heating temperature (22.7–71.7 °C) of Ag NW‐CPI film. The result reveals that the ORGO sheets exhibit high sensitivity of 2.69% with reversible response/recovery sensing properties and minimal deviation of baseline resistance of around 1% toward NO 2 molecules when the temperature of Ag NW‐CPI film is 71.7 °C. This work first demonstrates the improved reversible NO 2 sensing properties of ORGO sheets on flexible and transparent Ag NW‐CPI film assisted by Ag NW heating networks.