Developing underwater adhesives is important in many applications. Despite extensive progress, achieving strong, stable, and durable underwater adhesion via a simple and effective way is still challenging, mainly due to the conflict between the interfacial and bulk properties. Here, we report a unique bio-inspired strategy to facilely construct superior underwater adhesives with desirable interfacial and bulk properties. For adhesive design, a hydrophilic backbone is utilized to quickly absorb water for effective dehydration, and a novel amino acid-resembling functional block is developed to provide versatile molecular interactions for high interfacial adhesion. Moreover, the conjunction of these two components enables the generation of abundant covalent crosslinks for robust bulk cohesion. Such a rational design allows the adhesive to present a boosted underwater adhesion (3.92 MPa to glass), remarkable durability (maintaining high strength after one month), and good stability in various harsh environments (pH, salt, high temperature, and organic solvents). This strategy is generic, allowing the derivation of more similar adhesive designs easily and triggering new thinking for designing bio-inspired adhesives and beyond.

The strong adhesion of ice to surfaces results in unwanted effects in various industrial activities. However, current strategies for passive ice-phobic purposes lack either scalability or durability, or both, in industrial applications. In this study, erosion-resistant materials, including ceramic-based (WC, SiC, and alumina) and metal-based (a quasicrystalline coating, QC), were studied for their ice-phobic properties via push-off tests with bulk-water ice from -5 to -20 °C. Although their ice adhesion strengths were high (>400 kPa), their interfacial toughness with ice was quite low (1.1 to 2.6 J m-2) and comparable to polymeric surfaces. The force per width required to remove ice on the QC surface was even lower than that of a silicone (Sylgard 184) surface for an ice length of 7.0 cm. The low interfacial toughness of the erosion-resistant materials with ice was also retained after 1000 cycles of linear abrasion under a pressure of 27.0 kPa. The findings of this work expand the material selection options for durable large-scale ice-phobic applications and could enlighten the use of erosion-resistant materials in harsh industrial environments requiring effective de-icing.

Permissions Request permissions Back cover Mater. Horiz., 2023, 10, 1456 DOI: 10.1039/D3MH90018E This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given. Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

A laser-driven white light source promises intrinsic advantages for miniaturized endoscopic illumination. However, it remains a great challenge to simultaneously achieve high brightness and excellent colour rendition due to the shortage of highly efficient and thermally robust red-emitting laser phosphor converters. Here, we designed CaAlSiN3:Eu@Al (CASN@Al) converters with neglectable efficiency loss by tightly bonding all-inorganic phosphor films on an aluminium substrate. A layer-by-layer phosphor converter (LuAG/CASN@Al), i.e., stacking a green-emitting Lu3Al5O12:Ce (LuAG) layer on CASN@Al, was constructed to enhance light conversion efficiency and reduce reabsorption loss under blue laser excitation, which thus produces an excellent white light source with a luminous efficacy of 258 lm W-1 and a colour rendering index of 91. A miniaturized endoscopy with a coupling efficiency twice that of the commercial white LEDs was demonstrated by using the laser-driven white light and showed a central illuminance as high as 52 730 lx, more vivid images and long-term reliability.

Buildings are significant end-users of global energy. About 20% of the energy consumption worldwide is used for maintaining a comfortable indoor climate. Therefore, passive systems for indoor temperature and humidity regulation that can respond to environmental changes are very promising to reduce buildings' energy consumption. We developed a process to improve the responsiveness of wood to humidity changes by laser-drilling microscopic holes and incorporating a hygroscopic salt (calcium chloride). The resulting "transpiring wood" displays superior water adsorption capacity and high moisture exchange rate, allowing regulation of humidity and temperature by the exchange of moisture with the surrounding air. We proved that the hygrothermal performance of transpiring wood can be used to regulate indoor climate, with associated energy savings, for various climate types, thus favoring its application in the building sector. The reduction of temperature fluctuations, thanks to the buffering of temperature peaks, can lead to an indirect energy saving of about 10% for cooling and between 4-27% for heating depending on the climate. Furthermore, our transpiring wood meets different sustainability criteria, from raw materials to the fabrication process, resulting in a product with a low overall environmental impact and that is easy to recycle.

The optoelectronic performance of organic semiconductor devices is related to the static and dynamic disorder in the film. The disorder can be assessed by considering the linewidth of its optical...

Bioelectronics is an interdisciplinary field of research that aims to establish a synergy between electronics and biology. Contributing to a deeper understanding of bioelectronic processes and the built bioelectronic systems, a variety of new phenomena, mechanisms and concepts have been derived in the field of biology, medicine, energy, artificial intelligence science, etc. Organic semiconductors can promote the applications of bioelectronics in improving original performance and creating new features for organisms due to their excellent photoelectric and electrical properties. Recently, water-soluble conjugated polymers (WSCPs) have been employed as a class of ideal interface materials to regulate bioelectronic processes between biological systems and electronic systems, relying on their satisfying ionic conductivity, water-solubility, good biocompatibility and the additional mechanical and electrical properties. In this review, we summarize the prominent contributions of WSCPs in the aspect of the regulation of bioelectronic processes and highlight the latest advances in WSCPs for bioelectronic applications, involving biosynthetic systems, photosynthetic systems, biophotovoltaic systems, and bioelectronic devices. The challenges and outlooks of WSCPs in designing high-performance bioelectronic systems are also discussed.

Flexible and stretchable wearable electronic devices have received tremendous attention for their non-invasive and personal health monitoring applications. These devices have been fabricated by integrating flexible substrates and graphene nanostructures for non-invasive detection of physiological risk biomarkers from human bodily fluids, such as sweat, and monitoring of human physical motion tracking parameters. The extraordinary properties of graphene nanostructures in fully integrated wearable devices have enabled improved sensitivity, electronic readouts, signal conditioning and communication, energy harvesting from power sources through electrode design and patterning, and graphene surface modification or treatment. This review explores advances made toward the fabrication of graphene-interfaced wearable sensors, flexible and stretchable conductive graphene electrodes, as well as their potential applications in electrochemical sensors and field-effect-transistors (FETs) with special emphasis on monitoring sweat biomarkers, mainly in glucose-sensing applications. The review emphasizes flexible wearable sweat sensors and provides various approaches thus far employed for the fabrication of graphene-enabled conductive and stretchable micro-nano electrodes, such as photolithography, electron-beam evaporation, laser-induced graphene designing, ink printing, chemical-synthesis and graphene surface modification. It further explores existing graphene-interfaced flexible wearable electronic devices utilized for sweat glucose sensing, and their technological potential for non-invasive health monitoring applications.

Laser-driven liquid crystal displays (LCDs) comprising metal halide perovskites (MHPs) as the blue-to-green/red color converters are at the forefront of ongoing intense research on the development and improvement of display devices. However, the inferior high photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of MHPs under the excitation of high-power blue light and photoluminescence deterioration at high temperatures remain major concerns. Herein, we design a kind of octylamine-modified MHP via binding energy engineering, and the synthesized materials show PLQY of 97.6% under the excitation of a blue laser at 450 nm. Meanwhile, this design endows a structural self-healing ability to achieve a high PLQY and luminescence stability under high temperature (90 °C) and high flux excitation (386 mW cm-2). The blue light-excitable MHPs with a near unity PLQY, strong stability, and low PLQY deterioration are further encapsulated into a laser-driven LCD device. This prototype demonstrates excellent color gamut (132% NTSC, 98% Rec. 2020), illuminance intensity (>10 000 lux), and energy consumption (47.5% of commercial consumption), and hence is expected to be beneficial for the reduction of energy consumption in backlight display devices, particularly in large-screen outdoor displays.

Metamaterials possess exotic properties that do not occur in nature and have attracted significant attention in research and engineering. Two decades ago, the field of metamaterials emerged from linear electromagnetism, and today it encompasses a wide range of aspects related to solid matter, including electromagnetic and optical, mechanical and acoustic, as well as unusual thermal or mass transport phenomena. Combining different material properties can lead to emergent synergistic functions applicable in everyday life. Nevertheless, making such metamaterials in a robust, facile, and scalable manner is still challenging. This paper presents an effective protocol allowing for metasurfaces offering a synergy between optical and thermal properties. It utilizes liquid crystalline suspensions of nanosheets comprising two transparent silicate monolayers in a double stack, where gold nanoparticles are sandwiched between the two silicate monolayers. The colloidally stable suspension of nanosheets was applied in nanometre-thick coatings onto various substrates. The transparent coatings serve as absorbers in the infrared spectrum allowing for the efficient conversion of sunlight into heat. The peculiar metasurface couples plasmon-enhanced adsorption with anisotropic heat conduction in the plane of the coating, both at the nanoscale. Processing of the coating is based on scalable and affordable wet colloidal processing instead of having to apply physical deposition in high vacuum or lithographic techniques. Upon solar irradiation, the colloidal metasurface is quickly (60% of the time taken for the non-coated glass) heated to the level where complete defogging is assured without sacrificing transparency in the visible range. The protocol is generally applicable allowing for intercalation of any nanoparticles covering a range of physical properties that are then inherited to colloidal nanosheets. Because of their large aspect ratio, the nanosheets will inevitably orient parallel to any surface. This will allow for a toolbox capable of mimicking metamaterial properties while assuring facile processing via dip coating or spray coating.