Work

Tough, Crack-Resistant Ionogels Based on Chain Entanglement Structures for Health Monitoring Applications

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The advent of flexible bioelectronics has revolutionized health monitoring by offering ergonomic, comfortable, and user-friendly solutions for timely and comprehensive health status assessments. However, the flexible electronics based on conventional ionogels suffer from limitations such as poor mechanical properties, insufficient toughness, and poor energy dissipation, which hinder their widespread adoption. To address these challenges, high-performance ionogels with excellent transparency, considerable toughness and cracking resistance are designed and developed, which is based on the significant chain-entangled structures within a single network. The chain-entangled ionogels exhibit a remarkable fracture toughness of 1.2350 ± 0.046 kJ/m2, approximately ten times higher than that of ionogels with highly cross-linked networks. Simultaneously, the quite crack-insensitive ionogels are stabilized after continuous cyclic experiments, with an energy release rate of G=160 J/m2 and the fatigue threshold of approximately 190 J/m2, due to the hydrogen bonding, electrostatic interaction and polymer chain entanglements. Additionally, the resulting ionogels with excellent ionic conductivity in the range of -20 to 100 oC are acted as electrodes to facilitate continuous real-time monitoring of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, which is a promising candidate for applications in health monitoring fields, such as ECG monitoring and sleep stage evaluation.

Source: ACS Applied Polymer Materials

DOI: 10.1021/acsapm.5c00823