Highly Stretchable, Fast Self‐Healing, Responsive Conductive Hydrogels for Supercapacitor Electrode and Motion Sensor

• Published in: Macromolecular materials and engineering Vol. 305; no. 5
• Main Authors: Wei, Duanli, Wang, Haonan, Zhu, Jiaqing, Luo, Licheng, Huang, Huabo, Li, Liang, Yu, Xianghua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Weinheim John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01.05.2020
• Subjects: Biosensors; Borax; conductive hydrogels; Conductivity; Electrochemical analysis; Electrodes; Electronic devices; Healing; Hydrogels; Hydrogen bonding; Moisture content; Motion sensors; multifunction; Nanotubes; poly(vinyl alcohol); polypyrrole; Polypyrroles; Polyvinyl alcohol; Smart materials; Stretchability; Supercapacitors
• DOI: 10.1002/mame.202000018
• ISSN: 1438-7492

Conductive hydrogels as potential soft materials have attracted tremendous attention in wearable electronic devices. Nonetheless, manufacturing intelligent materials that integrate mouldability, stretchability, responsive ability, fast self‐healing ability, as well as mechanical and electrochemical properties is still a challenge. Here, multifunctional conductive hydrogels composed of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and polypyrrole (PPy) nanotube are prepared using borax as cross‐linker. The existence of multicomplexation, entangled PVA chains, and interconnected PPy nanotubes, as well as extensive hydrogen bonding results in the fabrication of hierarchical network of PVA‐PPy hydrogels. PVA‐PPy hydrogels exhibit high stretchability (more than 1000%), multiresponsiveness, low density (0.95 g cm−3), high water content (96%), and 15 s self‐healing features. Furthermore, the self‐healing supercapacitor electrode and motion sensor based on PVA‐PPy hydrogels demonstrate ideal performances. This facile strategy in this work would be promising to construct an excellent multifunctional soft material for various flexible electrode and biosensor. Multifunctional conductive hydrogels composed of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and polypyrrole (PPy) nanotube are prepared using borax as cross‐linker. PVA‐PPy hydrogels with hierarchical 3D network exhibit high stretchability, multiresponsiveness, low density, high water content, and fast self‐healing features. The self‐healing supercapacitor electrode and motion sensor based on PVA‐PPy hydrogels demonstrate ideal performance.