The low resistance and high sensitivity in stretchable electrode assembled by liquid-phase exfoliated graphene

Abstract

Flexible electrodes have been extensively investigated to fulfill the development of highly advanced human interaction electronics. It's still a challenge to develop the conductive film for the scalable device with low resistance under large deformation. In this work, we reported a stretchable conductive layer on elastomer substrates assembled by few-layer graphene, which was exfoliated in the low-boiling organic solvent with assistance of hyperbranched copolymer as stabilizer that was adsorbed on the nanosheets via CH-π non-covalent connections. The relative resistance change of graphene film is 117% as the mechanical strain reaches 35%, which retains high conductivity under tensile operation. The resistance of the graphene electrode is dependent on the overlapping of the nanosheets during the deformation, in which the slipping of nanosheets is due to the lubricant effect of the hyperbranched segments acting as dynamic CH-π interactions. This work highlights a general strategy of the stretchable conductive film for the flexible electronics, and sheds a light on the conduction mechanism for the graphene film during large deformation.