Empowering soft conductive elastomers with self-reinforcement and remarkable resilience via phase-locking ions

Abstract

Endowing soft and long-range stretchable elastomers with exceptional strength, resilience, and ion-conductivity is crucial for high-performance flexible sensors. However, achieving this entails significant challenges due to intrinsic yet mutually exclusive structural factors. In this work, a series of self-reinforcing ion-conductive elastomers (SRICEs) is thus designed to meet the advanced but challenging requirements. The SRICEs behave like a soft/hard dual-phase separated micro-structure, which is optimized through a straightforward preferential assembly strategy (PAS) to ensure that the subsequently introduced ions are locked in the soft phase. Meanwhile, the interaction between ions and soft segments is meticulously tailored to achieve self-reinforcement through strain-induced crystallization. Consequently, an outstanding ultimate strength of approximately ∼51.0 MPa and an exceptional instant resilient efficiency of ∼92.9% are attained. To the best knowledge of the authors, these are the record-high values achieved simultaneously in one ion-conductive elastomer. Furthermore, the resultant toughness of ∼202.4 MJ m⁻³ is significantly higher, while the modulus of ∼5.0 MPa is lower than that of most reported robust ion-conductive elastomers. This unique combination of properties makes it suitable for advanced flexible applications, e.g. grid-free position recognition sensors. This work provides guidance for designing soft yet robust ion-conductive elastomers and optimizing their mechanical properties.