Printed electronics on elastomer substrates have found wide applications in wearable devices and soft robotics. For everyday usage, additional requirements exist for the robustness of the printed flexible electrodes, such as the ability to resist scratching and damage. Therefore, highly robust electrodes with self‐healing, and good mechanical strength and stretchability are highly required and challenging. In this paper, a cross‐linking polyurea using polydimethylsiloxane as the soft segment and dynamic urea bonds is prepared and serves as a self‐healing elastomer substrate for coating and printing of silver nanowires (AgNWs). Due to the dynamic exchangeable urea bond at 60 °C, the elastomer exhibits dynamic exchange of the cross‐linking network while retaining the macroscopic shape. As a result, the AgNWs are partially embedded in the surface of the elastomer substrate when coated or printed at 60 °C, forming strong interfacial adhesion. As a result, the obtained stretchable electrode exhibits high mechanical strength and stretchability, the ability to resist scratching and sonication, and self‐healing. This strategy can be applied to a variety of different conducting electrode materials including AgNWs, silver particles, and liquid metal, which provides a new way to prepare robust and self‐healing printed electronics.
Dual-network conductive hydrogels have drawn wide attention in epidemic electronics such as epidemic sensors and electrodes because of their inherent low Young's modulus, high skincompliance, and tunable mechanical strength. However, it is still full of challenges to gain a dual-network hydrogel with high stretchability, low hysteresis, and skin-adhesive performance simultaneously. Herein, to address this issue, a novel dual-network hydrogel (denoted as PAa hydrogel) with polyacrylamide as the first network and topologically entangled polydopamine as the secondary network was prepared through a facile gel-phase in situ self-polymerization and soaking treatment. Benefiting from the topological enhancement as well as the synergetic effects of hydrogen bonds and metal coordination bonds, low modulus (∼10 kPa), excellent stretchability (1090.8%), high compression (90%), negligible hysteresis (η = 0.019, energy loss coefficient), rapid recovery in seconds, and selfadhesion are obtained in the PAa hydrogels. To demonstrate their practical use, a states-independent and skin-adhesive epidemic sensor was successfully attached on human skin for motion detection. What is more, by using the hydrogel as an epidemic electrode, electromyogram signals were accurately detected and wirelessly transmitted to a smart phone. This work offers a new insight to understand the strengthening mechanism of dual network hydrogels and a design strategy for both epidemic sensors and electrodes.
Interface engineering has led to significant progress in solution-processed CdTe nanocrystal (NC) solar cells in recent years. High performance solar cells can be fabricated by introducing a hole transfer layer (HTL) between CdTe and a back contact electrode to reduce carrier recombination by forming interfacial dipole effect at the interface. Here, we report the usage of a commercial product 2,2′,7,7′-tetrakis[N,N-di(4-methoxyphenyl)amino]-9,9′-spirobifluorene (Spiro) as a hole transfer layer to facilitate the hole collecting for CdTe nanocrystal solar cells. It is found that heat treatment on the hole transfer layer has significant influence on the NC solar cells performance. The Jsc, Voc, and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of NC solar cells are simultaneously increased due to the decreased contact resistance and enhanced built-in electric field. We demonstrate solar cells that achieve a high PCE of 8.34% for solution-processed CdTe NC solar cells with an inverted structure by further optimizing the HTL annealing temperature, which is among the highest value in CdTe NC solar cells with the inverted structure.
Achieving stable and low-resistance interfaces for hole transport layers with well-matched energy levels is crucial to maximize the performance of solution-processed CdTe nanocrystal (NC) based solar cells.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.