Wearable electronics with healability have been extensively researched recently. To provide wearing comfort, fabrics are often adopted as the base materials. Intrinsic healability, however, is challenging for fabrics because of the inability to retain the fibrous morphologies. Herein, an unprecedented strategy is presented for producing electrospun fabrics that are intrinsically healable by carefully balancing the crystalline structural support and healing ability. Fluorocarbon polymers with different crystallinities are mixed with ionic liquids to form ionogels, which are spun into fabrics using a unique wet electrospinning apparatus. Importantly, the introduction of the crystalline domains prevents the fusion of the electrospun fibers; even after 1 year, no significant morphological change is observed. The nonwoven fabrics are not only stretchable and waterproof but also intrinsically healable. The ion–dipole interactions between the polar copolymers and ionic liquids provide the reversible physical crosslinking essential to the healing capability. When damaged, the fabrics can be overlapped and healed after applying pressure. Moreover, the fabrics demonstrate healability underwater. Healable sensing devices, pressure, and tensile sensors are also designed by printing ion‐conductive gels as electrodes. Both devices show good stability before and after healing. This work demonstrates the first example of intrinsically healable electrospun fabrics, which are promising for fabric‐based wearable electronics and smart clothing.
Phase changing materials (PCMs) have been widely investigated because of their unique properties and applications. In recent years, PCMs have been embedded into polymer fibers for thermal regulating purposes. The PCMcontaining polymer fibers, however, usually suffer the leakage problem because PCMs are not covered well by polymers in fibers. To solve this problem, in this study, we develop a facile strategy to fabricate PCM-containing polymer fibers without the leakage problem. The PCM/polystyrene (PS) coreshell microspheres are first prepared by suspension polymerization, in which n-hexadecane is used as the PCM. By blending the PCM/PS microspheres into polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) solutions, The PMMA fibers blended with core-shell PCM/PS microspheres can be prepared via electrospinning. Acetic acid is chosen as the solvent, which can selectively dissolve PMMA and cannot dissolve PS. Therefore, the morphologies of the core-shell PCM/PS microspheres can be maintained during the electrospinning processes. The microspheres and fibers are characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Thermal imaging results demonstrate that the PCM-containing fibers can effectively regulate temperatures and fibers with higher contents of PCM exhibit better thermal regulating behaviors. Repeated thermal regulating experiments are also conducted for up to 4 cycles.
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