Investigation of UV curing behaviour of TCO coatings
Sabine Heusing, Thiago Martins Amaral, Peter William de Oliveira
INM-Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Campus D2 2, 66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
e-mail:
Keywords:
transparent conducting oxides, indium tin oxide, printed electronics
Transparent conducting oxides (TCO) are widely used as transparent electrodes and are
usually fabricated by vacuum processes. In this sense, the direct printing of TCO patterns
could be an enormous advantage since the multi-step process for patterning and etching
would be avoided.
In this work TCO inks, which can be printed by gravure and ink-jet printing process, were
developed and TCO coatings and patterns were printed. The inks were fabricated by
dispersion of TCO nanoparticles in a solvent with addition of a binder and a photoinitiator. In
order to obtain TCO coatings with low resistivity and high transmission, the UV curing
process should be optimized. Therefore the composition of the TCO ink was varied by
changing the photoinitiator, the binder and the solvents. The behaviour of the resistance was
studied during UV curing process. In addition, the untreated deposited coating and the UV
cured coatings were studied after certain UV doses by FTIR spectroscopy, in order to track
involved chemical reactions. The morphology of the UV treated coatings was studied by
SEM. As TCO material, first ITO nanoparticles were employed. It is expected, that the results
can be transferred to other TCO similar inks made with other, new TCO compositions. This
is the aim of further investigations.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded through the INFINITY project which has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement
No 641927
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