Self-Powered Smart Textiles for Accelerated Wound Healing through Band Alignment in Piezoelectric Heterojunctions.

Zhang, Di; Guo, Lingyun; Xin, Haoping; Ren, Lihui; Song, Siyun; Bai, Yunfei; Zhang, Chengwu; Liu, Wen et al. · ACS Nano · 2026

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Infected foot wounds often exhibit markedly prolonged healing due to local ischemia, multidrug-resistant pathogens, and chronic inflammation, representing a major clinical challenge. This work reports a piezoelectric heterojunction-based smart textile dressing, in which the heterostructure was constructed via atomic layer deposition (ALD) to achieve precise band-structure engineering. By tailoring the number of ZnO deposition cycles on BaTiO<sub>3</sub>, the optimized BaTiO<sub>3</sub>-10ZnO heterojunction (10 ALD cycles) exhibits the most favorable band alignment and a 2.95-fold boost in ROS generation efficiency compared with pristine BaTiO<sub>3</sub>. The composite is covalently immobilized onto textile fibers via amine-aldehyde condensation, yielding an intelligent textile platform. In a rat plantar infection model, the dressing, activated by walking-triggered mechanical pressure, achieves the most prominent therapeutic outcome, outperforming other ALD-cycle variants and commercial Ag<sup>+</sup> dressings. Systematic histological and transcriptomic analyses further unveil its multipronged antibacterial mechanisms, including bacterial membrane disruption, metabolic interference, and oxidative-stress induction. This work offers an innovative strategy for self-powered antimicrobial systems and demonstrates great potential for chronic wound management.