Environment Tolerant Conductive Nanocomposite Organohydrogels as Flexible Strain Sensors and Power Sources for Sustainable Electronics

Abstract

Conductive hydrogels (CHs) have been highlighted in the design of flexible strain sensors and stretchable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) on the basis of their excellent physicochemical properties such as large stretchability and high conductivity. Nevertheless, the incident freezing and drying behaviors of CHs by using water solvent as the dispersion medium limit their application scopes significantly. Herein, an environment tolerant and ultrastretchable organohydrogel is demonstrated by a simple solvent‐replacement strategy, in which the partial water in the as‐synthesized polyacrylamide/montmorillonite/carbon nanotubes hydrogel is replaced with the glycerol, leading to excellent temperature toleration (−60 to 60 °C) and good stability (30 days under normal environment) without sacrificing the stretchability and conductivity. The organohydrogel exhibits an ultrawide strain sensing range (0–4196%) with a high sensitivity of 8.5, enabling effective detection and discrimination of human activities that are gentle or drastic under various conditions. Furthermore, the organohydrogel is assembled in a single‐electrode TENG, which displays excellent energy harvesting ability even under a stretchability of 500% and robustness to directly power wearable electronics in harsh cold conditions. This work inspires a simple route for multifunctional organohydrogel and promises the practical application of flexible and self‐powered wearable devices in extreme environments.

Gradient adhesion modification of polyacrylamide/alginate–calcium tough hydrogels

“…The gradual increase of GF is also closely related to the narrowing of the channel in the hydrogel. 41…”

Flexible Ag Microparticle/MXene-Based Film for Energy Harvesting

“…The electrical output performance of STENG is affected by different factors such as pressure, frequency, and contact material [44][45][46][47][48]. Therefore, a linear motor is used to study the property of EHFs-based STENG in the periodic contactseparation motions.…”

Highly Transparent, Self-Healing, and Self-Adhesive Double Network Hydrogel for Wearable Sensors

“…Conventional semiconductor-based strain sensors have limitations in the next generation of electronics due to their inherent deficiencies (Liu et al, 2020), including brittleness, rigidity, and low biocompatibility (Zhang et al, 2022). In recent years, the applications of conductive hydrogel in wearable devices, soft robots, and artificial skin have attracted researchers' attention (Shen et al, 2021;Sun et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2021). Among these application scenarios, conductive hydrogel as wearable strain sensor for human movement monitoring is one of the most studied and reported directions (Ma et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2022a).…”

“…In general, good tensile properties, self-healing property, and selfadhesion are favorable for the use of hydrogels in wearable devices . Excellent tensile property makes hydrogel-based wearable devices suitable for large strain of human body, thus expanding the application range of sensors (Sun et al, 2021). He et al designed a silk fibroin-based hydrogel with considerable tensile and compressive properties, which enabled it to be assembled as a strain/pressure sensor with a wide sensing range (＞600%) (He et al, 2020).…”