Polymer cover windows are important components of flexible OLED displays but they easily generate wrinkles because of their weak folding resistance. Increasing the polymer thickness can improve the folding resistance but it decreases the touch sensitivity. Thus, fabricating highly foldable and supersensitive polymer cover windows is still challenging. Here, by incorporating cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and zirconia (ZrO 2 ) into colorless polyimide (CPI), we developed a highly foldable and supersensitive hybrid cover window. Inspired by the theory of elasticity, we added rigid CNCs into CPI to improve the elastic modulus and hence the foldability. ZrO 2 was introduced to improve dielectric properties, which leads to improved touch sensitivity. After these modifications, the elastic modulus of the cover windows was increased from 1432 to 2221 MPa, whereas its dielectric constant was increased from 2.95 to 3.46 (@1 × 10 6 Hz), resulting in significantly enhanced foldability and sensitivity. Meanwhile, because of the nano size of CNCs and ZrO 2 , the hybrid cover windows exhibit excellent optical properties with the transmittance of ∼88.1%@550 nm and haze of 2.39%. With improved and balanced mechanical, dielectric, and optical properties, these hybrid cover windows overcome current cover windows' defects and could be widely used in next-generation flexible displays.
As a natural antitumor drug, curcumin
(CUR) has received increasing
attention from researchers and patients due to its various medicinal
properties. However, currently CUR is still restricted due to its
low and stand-alone therapeutic effects that seriously limit its clinical
application. Here, by using cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) as a nanocarrier
to load CUR and AuNPs simultaneously, we developed a hybrid nanoparticle
as a codrug delivery system to enhance the low and stand-alone therapeutic
effects of CUR. Aided with the encapsulation of β-cyclodextrin
(βCD), both the solubility and the stability of CUR are greatly
enhanced (solubility increased from 0.89 to 131.7 μg/mL). Owing
to the unique rod-like morphology of CNCs, the system exhibits an
outstanding loading capacity of 31.4 μg/mg. Under the heat effects
of coloaded AuNPs, the system demonstrates a high release rate of
77.63%. Finally, with CNC as a bridge nanocarrier, all aforementioned
functions were integrated into one hybrid nanoparticle. The all-in-one
integration ensures CUR to have enhanced therapeutic effects and enables
the delivery system to exhibit combined chemo-photothermal therapy
outcomes. This work presents a significant step toward CUR’s
clinical application and provides a new strategy for effective and
integrative treatment of tumor disease.
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