A wearable sweat biosensing device is demonstrated that stimulates sweat and continuously measures sweat ethanol concentrations at 25 s intervals, which is then correlated with blood ethanol during a >3 hour testing phase.
Naturally occurring biomolecules have increasingly found applications in organic electronics as a low cost, performance-enhancing, environmentally safe alternative. Previous devices, which incorporated DNA in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), resulted in significant improvements in performance. In this work, nucleobases (NBs), constituents of DNA and RNA polymers, are investigated for integration into OLEDs. NB small molecules form excellent thin films by low-temperature evaporation, enabling seamless integration into vacuum deposited OLED fabrication. Thin film properties of adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), thymine (T), and uracil (U) are investigated. Next, their incorporation as electron-blocking (EBL) and hole-blocking layers (HBL) in phosphorescent OLEDs is explored. NBs affect OLED performance through charge transport control, following their electron affinity trend: G < A < C < T < U. G and A have lower electron affinity (1.8-2.2 eV), blocking electrons but allowing hole transport. C, T, and U have higher electron affinities (2.6-3.0 eV), transporting electrons and blocking hole transport. A-EBL-based OLEDs achieve current and external quantum efficiencies of 52 cd A(-1) and 14.3%, a ca. 50% performance increase over the baseline device with conventional EBL. The combination of enhanced performance, wide diversity of material properties, simplicity of use, and reduced cost indicate the promise of nucleobases for future OLED development.
Advances
in materials, designs, and controls are propelling the
field of soft robotics at an incredible rate; however, current methods
for prototyping soft robots remain cumbersome and struggle to incorporate
desirable geometric complexity. Herein, a vat photopolymerizable self-healing
elastomer system capable of extreme elongations up to 1000% is presented.
The material is formed from a combination of thiol/acrylate mixed
chain/step-growth polymerizations and uses a combination of physical
processes and dynamic-bond exchange via thioethers to achieve full
self-healing capacity over multiple damage/healing cycles. These elastomers
can be three dimensional (3D) printed with modular designs capable
of healing together to form highly complex and large functional soft
robots. Additionally, these materials show reprogrammable resting
shapes and compatibility with self-healing liquid metal electronics.
Using these capabilities, subcomponents with multiple internal channel
systems were printed, healed together, and combined with functional
liquid metals to form a high-wattage pneumatic switch and a humanoid-scale
soft robotic gripper. The combination of 3D printing and self-healing
elastomeric materials allows for facile production of support-free
parts with extreme complexity, resulting in a paradigm shift for the
construction of modular soft robotics.
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