Conductive hydrogels have potential applications in shielding electromagnetic (EM) radiation interference in deformable and wearable electronic devices, but usually suffer from poor environmental stability and stretching-induced shielding performance degradation. Although organohydrogels can improve the environmental stability of materials, their development is at the expense of reducing electrical conductivity and thus weakening EM interference shielding ability. Here, a MXene organohydrogel is prepared which is composed of MXene network for electron conduction, binary solvent channels for ion conduction, and abundant solvent-polymer-MXene interfaces for EM wave scattering. This organohydrogel possesses excellent anti-drying ability, low-temperature tolerance, stretchability, shape adaptability, adhesion and rapid self-healing ability. Two effective strategies have been proposed to solve the problems of current organohydrogel shielding materials. By reasonably controlling the MXene content and the glycerol-water ratio in the gel, MXene organohydrogel can exhibit exceptionally enhanced EM interference shielding performances compared to MXene hydrogel due to the increased physical cross-linking density of the gel. Moreover, MXene organohydrogel shows attractive stretching-enhanced interference effectiveness, caused by the connection and parallel arrangement of MXene nanosheets. This well-designed MXene organohydrogel has potential applications in shielding EM interference in deformable and wearable electronic devices.
Stretchable
conductive fibers are an important component of wearable
electronic textiles, but often suffer from a decrease in conductivity
upon stretching. The use of liquid metal (LM) droplets as conductive
fillers in elastic fibers is a promising solution. However, there
is an urgent need to develop effective strategies to achieve high
adhesion of LM droplets to substrates and establish efficient electron
transport paths between droplets. Here, we use large-sized MXene two-dimensional
conductive materials to modify magnetic LM droplets and prepare MXene/magnetic
LM/poly(styrene-butadiene-styrene) composite fibers (MLMS fibers).
The MXene sheets decorated on the surface of magnetic LM droplets
not only enhance the droplet adhesion to substrate but also bridge
adjacent droplets to establish efficient conductive paths. MLMS fibers
show several-fold improvements in tensile strength and elongation
and a 30-fold increase in conductivity compared with pure LM-filled
fibers. These conductive fibers can be easily woven into multifunctional
textiles, which exhibit strong electromagnetic interference shielding
and stable Joule heating performances even under large tensile deformation.
In addition, other advantages of MLMS textiles, such as high gas/liquid
permeability, strong chemical resistance (acid and alkaline conditions),
high/low-temperature tolerance (−40–150 °C) and
water washability, make them particularly suitable for wearable applications.
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