Highly conductive and stretchable nanostructured ionogels for 3D printing capacitive sensors with superior performance

Abstract

Ionogels are promising material candidates for ionotronics due to their excellent ionic conductivity, stretchability, and thermal stability. However, it is challenging to develop 3D printable ionogels with both excellent electrical and mechanical properties. Here, we report a highly conductive and stretchable nanostructured (CSN) ionogel for 3D printing ionotronic sensors. We propose the photopolymerization-induced microphase separation strategy to prepare the CSN ionogels comprising continuous conducting nanochannels intertwined with cross-linked polymeric framework. The resultant CSN ionogels simultaneously achieves high ionic conductivity (over 3 S m−1), high stretchability (over 1500%), low degree of hysteresis (0.4% at 50% strain), wide-temperature-range thermostability (−72 to 250 °C). Moreover, its high compatible with DLP 3D printing enables the fabrication of complex ionogel micro-architectures with high resolution (up to 5 μm), which allows us to manufacture capacitive sensors with superior sensing performances. The proposed CSN ionogel paves an efficient way to manufacture the next-generation capacitive sensors with enhanced performance. Achieving high conductivity without sacrificing printability and mechanical properties of ionogels for ionotronics is difficult. Here, the authors report an UV curable ionogel with bicontinuous nanostructures and using dynamic light processing 3D printing, they fabricate high performance ionogel sensors.