Integrating charge mobility, stability and stretchability within conjugated polymer films for stretchable multifunctional sensors
Abstract
Conjugated polymers (CPs) are promising semiconductors for intrinsically stretchable electronic devices. Ideally, such CPs should exhibit high charge mobility, excellent stability, and high stretchability. However, converging all these desirable properties in CPs has not been achieved via molecular design and/or device engineering. This work details the design, synthesis and characterization of a random polythiophene (RP-T50) containing ~50 mol% of thiophene units with a thermocleavable tertiary ester side chain and ~50 mol% of unsubstituted thiophene units, which, upon thermocleavage of alkyl chains, shows significant improvement of charge mobility and stability. Thermal annealing a RP-T50 film coated on a stretchable polydimethylsiloxane substrate spontaneously generates wrinkling in the polymer film, which effectively enhances the stretchability of the polymer film. The wrinkled RP-T50-based stretchable sensors can effectively detect humidity, ethanol, temperature and light even under 50% uniaxial and 30% biaxial strains. Our discoveries offer new design rationale of strategically applying CPs to intrinsically stretchable electronic systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- May 18, 2022
- Source ID
- 10.1038/s41467-022-30361-0
Entities
People
- Giwon Lee
- Hongyu Wang
- Qingshan Wei
- Stephanie Samson
- Sung Yun Son
- Wei You
- Yong Zhu
Organizations
- National Science Foundation
- North Carolina State University
- Office of Naval Research