Dialcohol Cellulose Nanocrystals Enhanced Polymerizable Deep Eutectic Solvent‐Based Self‐Healing Ion Conductors with Ultra‐Stretchability and Sensitivity

Abstract

Recently, ion conductors have been extensively explored in various fields due to their flexibility, sensitivity, and conductivity. However, ultrastretchable and self-healing ion conductors with wide sensing ranges and high sensitivity are rarely reported. In this study, dialcohol cellulose nanocrystals (DCNCs) are successfully fabricated by sequential periodate oxidization and reduction and introduced them into polymerizable deep eutectic solvents (PDES) to prepare nanocomposite ion conductors. Due to the high dispersity of DCNCs in PDES, the obtained ion conductors exhibit improved tensile strain (3869 ± 607.21%) and tensile stress (0.220 ± 0.022 MPa) simultaneously, and display self-healing ability in terms of both electrical and mechanical properties. In addition, the ion conductors are able to detect human motions by transmitting deformation into resistance signals even after self-healing, which prolongs the service life. Generally, this study paves the way for the design of self-healing and stretchable ion conductors for wearable electronics.

All-cellulose hydrogel-based adhesive

“…Due to the nano-scaled dimension and abundant surface hydroxyl groups, nanocellulose is known to form strong cohesive bonds to yield super-strong film (>100 MPa) upon drying. [34][35][36][37][38] However, cellulose generally does not show satisfactory adhesive strength to bind different substrates together. According to the adhesion theory, where both physical and chemical interactions are needed to form strong cohesive and adhesive bonds, it is hypothesized that the weak adhesive strength of cellulose could be ascribed to the low flexibility and mobility of cellulose chains caused by the rigid AGU rings and restricted rotation due to the intramolecular hydrogen bonds (O3H•••O5, O2H•••O6).…”

Dry ionic conductive elastomers based on polymeric deep eutectic solvents for bioelectronics

“…Following a similar strategy, Jiang et al recently proposed the derivatization of CNC (164 nm length and 10.0 nm width) by introducing more primary hydroxyl groups (DCNC) to improve their dispersibility in the AA:ChCl PDES and consequently increase the nanofiller concentration in the polyDES. 86 The fully physically crosslinked nanocomposite elastomer with 2 wt% of DCNC showed fracture strain up to 3869% and a tensile strength of 0.22 MPa. Furthermore, these ICEs exhibited an excellent sensing ability with a wide sensing range (up to 2000% strain) and low detection limit (1% strain).…”