Abstract
Hydrogels and liquid metals have been emerging as potential materials for use in self-healing electronics. This paper presents a simple fabrication procedure for a custom-designed hydrogel-liquid metal composite and its various applications. The hydrogel is patterned using three-dimensional printed molds for creating an electrical pathway, which is subsequently filled with liquid metal. The lifetime and self-healing property of the hydrogel improve drastically through coating of its surface with a moisture protectant layer and via the formation of an oxidized layer of liquid metal, respectively. Three joined units of the resulting hydrogel-liquid metal composite are successfully applied as self-healable electrodes in a customizable multimodular sensor system consisting of a photoresistor, a thermistor, and a tilt switch. The composite is also used as an electrode for biosignal (electromyogram, electrocardiogram, and electrodermal activity) detection, and its sensing ability is found to be comparable to that of a conventional Ag/AgCl electrode. The demonstrated hydrogel-liquid metal composite provides wide scope for researchers to achieve practical advances in self-healing electronics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 9824-9832 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 Feb 26 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Construction Technology Research Project (Grant No. 18SCIP-B146646-01) funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, Korea.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2020 American Chemical Society.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Materials Science(all)