Water-Processable, Stretchable, Self-Healable, Thermally Stable, and Transparent Ionic Conductors for Actuators and Sensors.

Lee, Junwoo; Tan, Matthew Wei Ming; Parida, Kaushik; Thangavel, Gurunathan; Park, Sang Ah; Park, Taiho; Lee, Pooi See · Adv Mater · 2020

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

For emerging biocompatible, wearable, and stretchable epidermal electronic devices, it is essential to realize novel stretchable conductors with the attributes of transparency, low-cost and nontoxic components, green-solvent processbility, self-healing, and thermal stabililty. Although conducting materials-rubber composites, ionic hydrogels, organogels have been developed, no stretchable material system that meets all the outlined requirements has been reported. Here, a series of P(SPMA-r-MMA) polymers with different ratios of ionic side chains is designed and synthesized, and it is demonstrated that the resulting stretchable ionic conductors with glycerol are transparent, water processable, self-healable, and thermally stable due to the chemically linked ionic side chain, satisfying all of the aforementioned requirements. Among the series of polymer gels, the P(SPMA<sub>0.75</sub> -r-MMA<sub>0.25</sub> ) gel shows optimum conductivity (6.7 × 10<sup>-4</sup> S cm<sup>-1</sup> ), stretchability (2636% of break at elongation), and self-healing (98.3% in 3 h) properties. Accordingly, the transparent and self-healable P(SPMA<sub>0.75</sub> -r-MMA<sub>0.25</sub> ) gels are used to realize thermally robust actuators up to 100 °C and deformable and self-healable thermal sensors.