Tunable H-bond effects enabled ionic conductive gels with high stretchability, transparency, self-adhesion and wide environmental tolerance for e-skin

Abstract

It is a high demand but a great challenge to construct all-in-one ionic conductive hydrogels with excellent mechanical performances, transparency, self-adhesion, conductivity and environmental tolerance. Herein, a versatile gel platform was developed via a facile and rapid photopolymerization of acrylic acid (AA) in deep eutectic solvent (DES) with multiple roles simultaneously as water-free solvent, ionic conductor, regulator of hydrogen bond density. Benefiting from the formed crosslinking networks including covalently cross-linked polymer network and multiple dynamic interactions, the resultant PAA-DES gels exhibited high stretchability of 884.7 ± 4.9%, toughness of 31.2 ± 1.4 MJ/m3, fatigue resistance and recovery ability, transparency of 93%, self-adhesive strength of 472 kPa. Moreover, the inherent advantages of DES enabled the gels with good ionic conductivity (2.5 ± 0.2 mS/cm), wide working window and biocompatibility. The PAA-DES as self-adhesive ionic sensors not only possessed wide strain range (∼400%) and stability, but also displayed excellent humidity (30–80%), temperature (−40–60 °C), and sweat tolerance which could precisely and steadily discern and monitor human motions and weak physiological signals. Thus, this work not only provides a strategy to construct all-in-one ionic conductive gels with high elasticity, fatigue resilience, transparency, self-adhesion and wide environmental tolerance, but also exploits versatile platform for intelligent gel sensor and e-skin.