Engineered Spherical Silver Powders for Low-Resistance Sintered Conductive Pastes
摘要
Silver powders play a pivotal role in electronic applications due to their superior conductivity and chemical stability, where morphology and particle size critically determine performance. This work presents a controllable liquid-phase reduction strategy to synthesize spherical silver powders using ascorbic acid as an eco-friendly reductant and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as a morphology-directing agent. Key synthesis parameters, including reactant mixing mode, temperature (30 °C), silver nitrate concentration (0.2 mol/L), PVP dosage (5 wt%), and reducing solution pH (3.3), were systematically optimized to achieve monodisperse spherical particles with an average size of 2 μm. When formulated into sintered conductive pastes with 75 wt% silver loading, the optimized powder enabled exceptional electrical and mechanical performance: a low sheet resistance of 5.3 mΩ/sq and robust adhesion exceeding 20 N. These results demonstrate a scalable route to tailor silver powders for high-performance electronic interconnects in photovoltaic and 5G modules, balancing cost-efficiency with functional reliability.