Skin-like mechanoresponsive self-healing ionic elastomer from supramolecular zwitterionic network.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34215738.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-24382-4 and PMC identifier 8253733.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Stretchable ionic skins are intriguing in mimicking the versatile sensations of natural skins. However, for their applications in advanced electronics, good elastic recovery, self-healing, and more importantly, skin-like nonlinear mechanoresponse (strain-stiffening) are essential but can be rarely met in one material. Here we demonstrate a robust proton-conductive ionic skin design via introducing an entropy-driven supramolecular zwitterionic reorganizable network to the hydrogen-bonded polycarboxylic acid network. The design allows two dynamic networks with distinct interacting strength to sequentially debond with stretch, and the conflict among elasticity, self-healing, and strain-stiffening can be thus defeated. The representative polyacrylic acid/betaine elastomer exhibits high stretchability (1600% elongation), immense strain-stiffening (24-fold modulus enhancement), ~100% self-healing, excellent elasticity (97.9 ± 1.1% recovery ratio, <14% hysteresis), high transparency (99.7 ± 0.1%), moisture-preserving, anti-freezing (elastic at -40 °C), water reprocessibility, as well as easy-to-peel adhesion. The combined advantages make the present ionic elastomer very promising in wearable iontronic sensors for human-machine interfacing.