A Facile Method to Fabricate a 3-D Porous Structure with Ag Nanowires as a Sensor Platform

Abstract

The nanoporous Ag material, with the sheet resistance of 0.13 Omega/square, was fabricated by the simple dropping casting of Ag nanowire inks on the substrate and consequential gentle heat-treatment. The thickness of the porous material increased proportionally with the number of ink drops applied, and resulted in low sheet resistance. The resulting structures were further applied on the Au surface of a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) chip, resulting in an improvement in the sensitivity by a factor of 57, which confirms the practicality of facilely generated 3-D Ag networks.