Versatile Light-Mediated Synthesis of Dry Ion-Conducting Dynamic Bottlebrush Networks with High Elasticity, Interfacial Adhesiveness, and Flame Retardancy

Abstract

Dry ion-conducting elastomers possess superior reliability in soft ionotronic devices when compared to ion-conducting gels that suffer from liquid evaporation or leakage issues. Recent works have shown that bottlebrush architecture can effectively reduce structural relaxation time so that the bottlebrush polymers have concentrated charge carriers and high chain mobility that result in good ionic conductivity and mechanical flexibility. Here, we report a novel and versatile light-mediated strategy for synthesizing dry ion-conducting elastomers with dynamic bottlebrush network structures. The obtained dry ion-conducting dynamic bottlebrush networks (DICDBNs) are colorless and highly transparent and can be simply patterned. We systematically investigate the influence of the number and length of the side chains in the DICDBNs on the physicochemical properties of the resultant materials and find that the optimized DICDBNs have high room-temperature ionic conductivity (2.05 × 10–4 S cm–1), good elasticity (stretchability 923%, 83.3% toughness recovery after 100 uninterrupted strain cycles at a strain of 300%), outstanding healing ability (healing efficiency 90.5%), on-demand degradability, excellent interfacial adhesiveness, good flame retardancy, and strain and temperature dual sensitivity, making them promising candidates for multifunctional wearable ionotronics.