Fully Rubbery Stretchable Electronics, Sensors, and Smart Skins

摘要

A general strategy to impart mechanical stretchability to stretchable electronics involves engineering materials into specialarchitectures to accommodate or eliminate the mechanical strain in nonstretchable electronic materials while stretched. Weintroduce an all solution–processed type of electronics and sensors that are rubbery and intrinsically stretchable as anoutcome from all the elastomeric materials in percolated composite formats with P3HT-NFs [poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) nanofibrils] and AuNP-AgNW (Au nanoparticles with conformally coated silver nanowires) in PDMS(polydimethylsiloxane). Rubbery sensors, which include strain, pressure, and temperature sensors, show reliable sensingcapabilities and are exploited as smart gloves that enable gesture translation and smart skins with temperature sensingcapability for robotics. Transistors and their arrays fully based on intrinsically stretchable electronic materials weredeveloped, and they retained electrical performances without substantial loss when subjected to 50% stretching. Fullyrubbery integrated electronics and logic gates were developed, and they also functioned reliably upon mechanicalstretching. A rubbery active matrix based elastic tactile sensing skin to map physical touch was demonstrated to illustrateone of the applications.