Stretchable conductive fibers are key elements for next‐generation flexible electronics. Most existing conductive fibers are electron‐based, opaque, relatively rigid, and show a significant increase in resistance during stretching. Accordingly, soft, stretchable, and transparent ion‐conductive hydrogel fibers have attracted significant attention. However, hydrogel fibers are difficult to manufacture and easy to dry and freeze, which significantly hinders their wide range of applications. Herein, organohydrogel fibers are designed to address these challenges. First, a newly designed hybrid crosslinking strategy continuously wet‐spins hydrogel fibers, which are transformed into organohydrogel fibers by simple solvent replacement. The organohydrogel fibers show excellent antifreezing (< ‐80 °C) capability, stability (>5 months), transparency, and stretchability. The predominantly covalently crosslinked network ensures the fibers have a high dynamic mechanical stability with negligible hysteresis and creep, from which previous conductive fibers usually suffer. Accordingly, strain sensors made from the organohydrogel fibers accurately capture high‐frequency (4 Hz) and high‐speed (24 cm s−1) motion and exhibit little drift for 1000 stretch–release cycles, and are powerful for detecting rapid cyclic motions such as engine valves and are difficult to reach by previously reported conductive fibers. The organohydrogel fibers also demonstrate potential as wearable anisotropic sensors, data gloves, soft electrodes, and optical fibers.
Natural tissues possess superior material properties such as self-healing, mechanical robustness, and mechanical gradients that allow organisms to adapt and survive in dangerous environments. Although highly desired, imparting synthetic materials with these biomimetic protective features remains a challenge. Here, the versatile dimethylglyoxime-urethane (DOU) moiety is used to create a multifunctional polyurethane (DOU-PU). The reactivities of DOU including reversible dissociation, metal coordination, photolysis enabled self-healing, high strength and toughness, mechanical gradient formation, and spatially controlled functionalization. By incorporating DOU, a multifunctional protective film is produced with superior resistance to mechanical damage, rapid room temperature self-healing, and anti-counterfeiting features. This super biomimetic film is expected to be very useful for the protection of various types of valuable objects such as electronics, diplomas, currency, and automobiles.
AbstractElastomers are essential for emerging stretchable electronics, which has become more and more important to bio-integrated devices. To ensure a high compliance to application environment, elastomers are expected to resist and even self-repair the mechanical damages, be friendly to human body. Herein, inspired by peptidoglycan, we designed the first room-temperature autonomous self-healing biodegradable and biocompatible elastomers, poly(sebacoyl 1,6-hexamethylenedicarbamate diglyceride) (PSeHCD) elastomers. The unique structure including alternating ester-urethane moieties and bionic hybrid crosslinking endowed PSeHCD elastomers superior properties: ultrafast self-healing, tunable biomimetic mechanical properties, facile reprocessability, as well as good biocompatibility and biodegradability. The potential of PSeHCD elastomers was demonstrated by super-fast self-healing stretchable conductor (21 s) and motion sensor (2 min). This work provides new design and synthetic principle of elastomers for the applications in bio-integrated electronics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.