Flexible Metamaterial Electronics

Abstract

Over the last decade, extensive efforts have been made on utilizing advanced materials and structures to improve the properties and functionalities of flexible electronics. While the conventional ways are approaching their natural limits, a revolutionary strategy, namely metamaterials, is emerging toward engineering structural materials to break the existing fetters. Metamaterials exhibit supernatural physical behaviors, in aspects of mechanical, optical, thermal, acoustic, and electronic properties that are inaccessible in natural materials, such as tunable stiffness or Poisson's ratio, manipulating electromagnetic or elastic waves, and topological and programmable morphability. These salient merits motivate metamaterials as a brand‐new research direction and have inspired extensive innovative applications in flexible electronics. Here, such a groundbreaking interdisciplinary field is first coined as “flexible metamaterial electronics,” focusing on enhancing and innovating functionalities of flexible electronics via the design of metamaterials. Herein, the latest progress and trends in this infant field are reviewed while highlighting their potential value. First, a brief overview starts with introducing the combination of metamaterials and flexible electronics. Then, the developed applications are discussed, such as self‐adaptive deformability, ultrahigh sensitivity, and multidisciplinary functionality, followed by the discussion of potential prospects. Finally, the challenges and opportunities facing flexible metamaterial electronics to advance this cutting‐edge field are summarized.

A Snakeskin‐Inspired, Soft‐Hinge Kirigami Metamaterial for Self‐Adaptive Conformal Electronic Armor

“…Kirigami mechanical metamaterials (Kiri-MMs) have shown great potential in flexible electronics and soft robotics [22][23][24] due to their extraordinary mechanical properties including tunable Poisson's ratio, [25,26] high stretchability, [27][28][29] programmable morphability, [30][31][32][33][34] and configurable 2D-to-3D transformability. [35][36][37][38] Many creative kirigami-inspired applications have been achieved such as soft crawler, [39] shoe grip, [40] morphable stent, [41] adaptive imager, [42] and flexible car shell.…”

Molecular Doping of Flexible Lead‐Free Perovskite‐Polymer Thick Membranes for High‐Performance X‐Ray Detection

“…Flexible electronics have attracted extensive interest in the research community owing to their potential applicability in wearable electronics, [9] wherein brittle crystal electronics cannot be utilized. Nie and co‐workers demonstrated the feasibility of flexible Pb‐based perovskite films, which were fabricated from a Ruddlesden–Popper‐type (BA) 2 (MA) 2 Pb 3 I 10 (BA=butylamine, MA=methylammonium) solution on flexible conductive Kapton tape, for X‐ray detection [10] .…”

Tailoring of an ultralow temperature adaptive cellulose nanofiber-based flexible zinc-air battery with long cycle life

“…Flexible electronics are attracting extensive attention due to their wide application prospects. 1 At present, high energy density and safe power sources have been proposed to meet the demands of light weight, exibility, bendability, and wearability for exible electronics. [2][3][4] To meet the needs of practical applications, its power supply device also needs to have the ability to operate normally in extreme environments.…”