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Designing Supertough and Ultrastretchable Liquid Metal-Embedded Natural Rubber Composites for Soft-Matter Engineering
Shib Shankar Banerjee1, Subhradeep Mandal1, Injamamul Arief1
1Leibniz-Institut für Polymerforschung Dresden e. V, Hohe Straße 6, Dresden 01069, Germany.
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
|March 29, 2021
Summary
Researchers developed tough, stretchable elastomers by embedding liquid metal into natural rubber. This scalable method enhances mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties for soft robotics and wearable electronics.
Area of Science:
- Materials Science
- Polymer Science
Background:
- Functional elastomers are crucial for soft robotics and wearable electronics due to their toughness and stretchability.
- Enhanced electrical and thermal properties are key for advanced electronic applications.
Purpose of the Study:
- To create a highly deformable natural rubber (NR) composite embedded with eutectic-GaIn liquid metal.
- To utilize industrially viable solid-state mixing and vulcanization for composite fabrication.
Main Methods:
- Incorporation of eutectic-GaIn liquid metal into natural rubber using solid-state mixing.
- Vulcanization of the composite to disperse liquid metal into submicron droplets within the cross-linked NR matrix.
- Evaluation of mechanical, elastic, thermal, and dielectric properties.
Main Results:
- Achieved high stretchability (strain at failure up to ~650%) and negligible hysteresis loss.
- Enhanced tearing energy by up to 6 times and reduced crack growth rate fourfold compared to control vulcanizate.
- Demonstrated improved thermal conductivity and dielectric properties of the resulting composites.
Conclusions:
- Developed a facile and scalable method for producing liquid metal-embedded soft elastomeric composites.
- The enhanced properties make these composites suitable for soft-matter engineering applications.
- This work paves the way for advanced soft robotics and wearable electronic devices.
