Integrating charge mobility, stability and stretchability within conjugated polymer films for stretchable multifunctional sensors.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 35585062.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-30361-0 and PMC identifier 9117230.
- 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
Conjugated polymers (CPs) are promising semiconductors for intrinsically stretchable electronic devices. Ideally, such CPs should exhibit high charge mobility, excellent stability, and high stretchability. However, converging all these desirable properties in CPs has not been achieved via molecular design and/or device engineering. This work details the design, synthesis and characterization of a random polythiophene (RP-T50) containing ~50 mol% of thiophene units with a thermocleavable tertiary ester side chain and ~50 mol% of unsubstituted thiophene units, which, upon thermocleavage of alkyl chains, shows significant improvement of charge mobility and stability. Thermal annealing a RP-T50 film coated on a stretchable polydimethylsiloxane substrate spontaneously generates wrinkling in the polymer film, which effectively enhances the stretchability of the polymer film. The wrinkled RP-T50-based stretchable sensors can effectively detect humidity, ethanol, temperature and light even under 50% uniaxial and 30% biaxial strains. Our discoveries offer new design rationale of strategically applying CPs to intrinsically stretchable electronic systems.