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Fabrication and Characterization of a Conformal Skin-like Electronic System for Quantitative, Cutaneous Wound Management
Published on: September 2, 2015
Fatigue-free artificial ionic skin toughened by self-healable elastic nanomesh
Jiqiang Wang1, Baohu Wu2, Peng Wei1
1State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology & Center for Advanced Low-dimension Materials, Donghua University, 2999 North Renmin Road, Shanghai, 201620, China.
Abstract:
Robust ionic sensing materials that are both fatigue-resistant and self-healable like human skin are essential for soft electronics and robotics with extended service life. However, most existing self-healable artificial ionic skins produced on the basis of network reconfiguration suffer from a low fatigue threshold due to the easy fracture of low-energy amorphous polymer chains with susceptible crack propagation. Here we engineer a fatigue-free yet fully healable hybrid ionic skin toughened by a high-energy, self-healable elastic nanomesh, resembling the repairable nanofibrous interwoven structure of human skin. Such a design affords a superhigh fatigue threshold of 2950 J m-2 while maintaining skin-like compliance, stretchability, and strain-adaptive stiffening response. Moreover, nanofiber tension-induced moisture breathing of ionic matrix leads to a record-high strain-sensing gauge factor of 66.8, far exceeding previous intrinsically stretchable ionic conductors. This concept creates opportunities for designing durable ion-conducting materials that replicate the unparalleled combinatory properties of natural skins more precisely.
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