Stretchable, Injectable, and Self-Healing Conductive Hydrogel Enabled by Multiple Hydrogen Bonding toward Wearable Electronics

By Jingsi Chen, Qiongyao Peng, T. Thundat, Hongbo Zeng. Chemistry of Materials, 2019

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Conducting polymer hydrogels have been employed in diverse fields such as energy storage and bioelectronics, which possess both the mechanical properties of hydrogels and electronic transport properties of conducting polymers. However, the rigid and fragile nature of conducting polymers hinders the long-time stability of the hydrogels and limits their applications in emerging flexible electronic devices. In this work, we have developed a novel type of multifunctional conductive polymer hydrogel, of which high conductivity is integrated with excellent stretchability, injectability, and rapid self-healing capability, by incorporating multiple hydrogen-bonding 2-ureido-4[1H]-pyrimidinone (UPy) groups as cross-linking points into a brittle polyaniline/poly(4-styrenesulfonate) (PANI/PSS) network. The formation of the interpenetrating PANI/PSS network offers the hydrogel electronic conduction assisted by ionic transport, showing a conductivity of 13 S/m and a linear response (gauge factor = 3.4) to external str...

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a56b7719354d255c8a757bccbde95c15f5c6178