All‐Polymer Based Stretchable Rubbery Electronics and Sensors

Abstract

The dissimilarity of material composition in existing stretchable electronics and biological organisms is a key bottleneck, still yet to be resolved, toward seamless integration between stretchable electronics and biological species. For instance, human or animal tissues and skins are fully made out of soft polymer species, while existing stretchable electronics are composed of rigid inorganic materials, either purely or partially. Soft stretchable electronics fully made out of polymeric materials with intrinsic softness and stretchability are sought after and therefore proposed to address this technical challenge. Here, rubbery electronics and sensors fully made out of stretchable polymeric materials including all-polymer rubbery transistors, sensors, and sensory skin, which have similar material composition to biology, are reported. The fabricated all-polymer rubbery transistors exhibit field-effect mobility of 1.11 cm 2 V -1 s -1 and retain their transistor performance even under mechanical stretch of 30%. In addition, all-polymer rubbery strain and temperature sensors are demonstrated with high gauge factor and good temperature sensing capability. Based on these all-polymer rubbery electronics, an active-matrix multiplexed sensory skin on a robotic hand is demonstrated to illustrate one of the applications.

High-Transconductance, Highly Elastic, Durable and Recyclable All-Polymer Electrochemical Transistors with 3D Micro-Engineered Interfaces

“…The electrochemical doping/de-doping process at the channel interface accompanied with ion flow through the solid-state electrolyte enables the modulation of the channel conductance, leading to a source-drain current ( I D ) that is switchable via the applied gate voltage ( V G ). The utilization of ion-conducting gels or elastomers combined with the PEDOT:PSS electrodes have been reported previously to realize substrate-free all-organic field-effect transistors [ 9 , 13 , 37 , 38 ], but the high-performance and stretchable all-polymer OECTs have yet to be demonstrated to date. To this end, a multifunctional elastic organohydrogel electrolyte GEL-GLY/Na 3 Cit was first developed consisting of gelatin (GEL) from natural sources, glycerol (GLY) as an anti-drying agent and sodium citrate (Na 3 Cit) to act as the electrolyte.…”

High-Transconductance, Highly Elastic, Durable and Recyclable All-Polymer Electrochemical Transistors with 3D Micro-engineered Interfaces

“…1). The utilization of ion-conducting gels or elastomers combined with PEDOT:PSS electrodes have been reported to realize substrate-free all-organic eld-effect transistors, [9,13,32,33] but the high-performance and stretchable all-polymer OECTs have yet to be demonstrated. To this end, rst a multifunctional elastic organohydrogel electrolyte was developed consisting of gelatin (GEL) from natural sources, glycerol (GLY) as the anti-drying agent and sodium citrate (Na 3 Cit) as the electrolyte, which could possess tunable toughness, good resilience, universal adhesiveness, wide environmental adaptivity and recyclability at the mean time.…”

Reconfigurable, Stretchable Strain Sensor with the Localized Controlling of Substrate Modulus by Two-Phase Liquid Metal Cells

“…The prepared graphene/CNTs mixture was spray coated on the heterogeneous substrate for 1 h at a certain rate and flow, and a 1.5 m-thick hybrid film was formed on the surface of the device. The Ag-PEDOT:PSS ink was prepared by mixing the highly conductive PEDOT:PSS solution with the Ag flakes at a weight ratio of 2:1 [ 32 ]. The gallium to be filled in the cell was pre-heated to 60 °C before injection.…”