Highly Strong and Transparent Ionic Conductive Hydrogel as Multifunctional Sensors

Abstract

AbstractIonic conductive hydrogels as promising materials have become focus of artificial soft tissue or soft stretchable electronic devices. Especially, the next‐generation flexible electronics greatly require achieving multifunction simultaneously. Herein, a transparent hydrogel with high mechanical properties (1.73 MPa for mechanical stress, 630% for mechanical strain) and excellent ionic conductivity is fabricated based on a fully physical cross‐linked network. The stiff long polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) chains as a skeleton to form a “hard” network and the short polyacrylic acid (PAA) chains regard as the “soft” network. Moreover, the biomaterial β‐cyclodextrin (β‐CD) as physical cross‐linkers is used in the “hard–soft” hybrid networks. The construction of “soft and hard” structure is successful to integrate the good transparency, remarkable mechanical properties, and outstanding sensitivity (strain, pressure, pH, and organic solvent) together for assembling multiple sensors, which hold a promising practical development value in the domain of soft wearable electronics and sensing materials in the future.