Conductivity enhancement of polymer composites using high-temperature short-time treated silver fillers

In this work, we develop an easy, convenient and effective high-temperature short-time annealing method to treat silver fillers through decomposing the silver oxide on the surface into silver nanoparticles and also in-situ paralyzing part of the surface lubricants to reduce the length of the tunneling distance between neighboring silver flakes. The modified micro silver flakes play a significant role in improving the electrical conductivity of the corresponding electrically conductive adhesives (ECAs), exhibiting the lowest resistivity of 1.28 × 10−4 Ω·cm at 70 wt% filler loading. This work suggests that the high-temperature short-time annealing strategy can greatly enhance the electrical conductivity of as-treated silver flakes based ECAs, which will allow them to be widely used in electronic packaging.