However, realizing the potential benefits of such metallic nanowire mesh in practical optoelectronic devices remains a great challenge because of the lack of reliability analysis. It is known that the pathway of current in a metallic nanowire mesh remains in the nanowire itself, instead of uniform distribution throughout the whole ITO film. Great reduction in current flow area will cause enormous increase in current density and significant rise in temperature due to Joule heating. Therefore, it is believed that the melting induced by Joule heating is a potential threat to the degradation of the metallic nanowire mesh-based TCE, which may cause deterioration of the

corresponding optoelectronic devices. In a pioneering experimental report, Khaligh and Goldthorpe [26] have indicated that at a constant current density, a random Ag nanowire network fails after a certain this website period. Moreover, the network selleck chemical with higher sheet resistance carrying greater current density will fail more easily because of Joule heating. Hereafter, a numerical method has been developed [27] by the present authors to clarify the melting behavior of metallic nanowire mesh due to Joule heating. Using this technique, a repetitive zigzag pattern in the relationship of melting current and melting voltage triggering the melting of the mesh was

discovered. It indicates that in real working conditions, a metallic nanowire mesh supplied with current source may experience repetitive

unstable (where several wires are melted simultaneously at a constant current/voltage) and stable (where an increment of current/voltage is necessary for melting progression) melting behavior until the mesh is open. However, some of these predicted intrinsic features in the melting of the metallic nanowire mesh would not be detectable because of the difficulty in sample preparation and experimental BCKDHB measurement. To overcome the above weakness, the relatively easy-to-prepare microwire mesh comes into the sight. One might expect the melting behavior of microwire and nanowire meshes to be similar by assuming that the currents would just scale up. However, metallic nanowire in general displays different properties from microwire because of significant size effect. For example, with decreasing dimension, melting point and thermal conductivity decrease while electrical resistivity increases. Such differences make it difficult to insist on the similarity of the melting behavior for microwire and nanowire meshes, even if both of which have the same structure under the same working conditions. Herein, to find the intrinsic relationship of the melting behavior between metallic microwire and nanowire meshes, the melting behavior of an Ag microwire mesh was numerically investigated and compared to that of the corresponding Ag nanowire mesh, which has the same mesh structure but different geometrical and physical properties of the wire itself.