Facile and High-Yield Replacement Reaction-Assisted Synthesis of Silver Dendrites by Jet for Conductive Ink

Metallic dendrites with uniform morphology, high purity, and large yield remain challenging to synthesize. In this work, single-crystalline silver (Ag) dendrites with uniform morphology, high purity, and large yield are successfully synthesized by employing single replacement reaction between aqueous silver nitrate (AgNO₃) and solid copper (Cu) by jet. The combined effect of diffusion-limited aggregation and the locally oriented attachment of Ag particles is responsible for the formation of silver dendrites under nonequilibrium conditions. Finally, the potential applications of as-synthesized silver dendrites are demonstrated by successfully preparing silver-based conductive ink for flexible electronics and wearable equipment. The conductive pattern exhibits resistivity of 7.2 μΩ·cm, showing good conductivity of the prepared conductive material. This facile and time-efficient synthetic route can be extended to synthesize other noble metal nanostructures with desired morphologies by adopting selective precursor salt concentrations and substrate metals with proper redox potentials.