Stretchable silver electrodes adopting double stress release design directly deposited on an eco-flex substrate

In this paper, stretchable electrodes adopting a double stress release structure were fabricated and characterized on eco-flex substrates. First, the correlation between mechanical properties applying surface plasma treatment and stretching capability of stretchable silver electrodes directly deposited on eco-flex substrate was studied. The Young’s modulus values of the substrate and metal were extracted using the force-distance relation via atomic force microscopy employing Johnson–Kendall–Roberts model. It was found that, as the Young’s modulus increased with the increase of plasma treatment time, the stretching capability first improved; then, samples showed no improvement over long plasma treatment time. This indicates that there is an optimum plasma treatment time to simultaneously achieve high stretching capability and low initial resistance. Using the optimum time, stretchable silver electrodes adopting double stress release structure along lateral and vertical directions were fabricated and the high stretching capability of the silver electrodes was achieved up to tensile strain of about 160%, as was high stability of up to 1000 times the multi-cycling strain.