Liquid metal@lignin-based double layered hydrogel with high stretchable, toughness, adhesion, and conductivity for...

Bio-based hydrogels are regarded as promising materials for wearable skins and sensing devices in bionic hand control systems, mainly due to their favorable characteristics like flexibility, adjustable mechanical properties, and biocompatibility. In this work, a lignin-based multifunctional bilayer hydrogel using lignin, polyvinyl alcohol and liquid gallium was prepared. The hydrogel exhibits high tensile strength (310 kPa), stretchability (490%), and high electrical conductivity (1.92 S m^-1), as well as self-healing, adhesion and degradability and recyclability. Notably, Gallium-based liquid metal was utilized as the conductive filler, which not only imparts high electrical conductivity to the material but also remarkably ameliorates its mechanical performance. The results indicated that the incorporation of liquid gallium enables more uniform dispersion of lignin aggregates, thereby enhancing the mechanical properties of the hydrogel. However, the incorporation of liquid metal gallium leads to a significant decrease in the adhesiveness of the hydrogel, and a double-layer hydrogel strategy was used to maintain the adhesion of the hydrogel in this study. Additionally, owing to the reactive characteristic of liquid metal crosslinks, the composites can be easily degraded and dissolved in water solutions under 85 °C, which allows the composites with liquid metal microdroplets to achieve a high recycling efficiency of 77%. Besides, a motion recognition system based on the hydrogel sensor is designed with the assistance of deep learning techniques to accurately identify human motion behaviors. This bio-based conductive hydrogel holds promising application prospects in the field of artificial flexible electronics.