Abstract
Conductive hydrogels have attracted enormous attention in wearable electronic devices due to considerable flexibility and similarity with human skin. Since the majority of hydrogels were fabricated by one-pot method alone and the conductivity change under strain was caused by the slight shape change and the fixed conductive path, further improvement of the sensitivity is hard. Thus, we cast the silver nanowires (AgNW) in ethanol solvent on the upper surface of polyacrylic acid/chitosan (PAA/CS) hydrogels prepared by one-pot method to obtain asymmetrical PAA/CS@AgNW hydrogels. As the construction of conductive surface, the ethanol gradually diffused into the hydrogel and caused the upper surface with ideal wrinkle structure. Thanks to the dual-effect of the design, the sensitivity was greatly enhanced with the ultra-high gauge factor (GF = 191.2, 7413, 18,720) at different pressure ranges. A series of reliable application performance (flexibility, self-healing, dry resistance and adhesion) and excellent electrical signal response (ultra-high sensitivity, identification, repetition and stability) was tested and indicated the potential applications in motion detection, gesture recognition and health monitoring.
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This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 22322022G-03).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yu Jiang, Wanqi Feng, Yixiang Chen and Jie Gu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yu Jiang and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Jiang, Y., Feng, W., Chen, Y. et al. Adhesive conductive hydrogels with wrinkled Janus surface and ultra-high sensitivity used as strain sensors. Cellulose 29, 9297–9309 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-022-04846-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-022-04846-6