Liquid Metal Composite Organohydrogel Based on Water-Soluble Starch Stabilizer with Supertoughness, Self-Healing, and Harsh-Environmental Tolerance for an Advanced Strain Sensor
Yue Xin, Shousen Chen, Weicheng Qiu, Junwu Zhu, Guanling Li, Baoliu Qu, Xin He, Xiaoshuang Li, Guoxing Sun, Jun Fu, Guang Zeng
Abstract
In this work, a supertough, self-healable, and extreme-environment-tolerable liquid metal (LM) composite organohydrogel was fabricated by dispersing LM particles (LMPs) with water-soluble starch (WS) and leveraging multilevel hydrogen-bonding interactions. Attributed to the cooperation of the strong dual-hydrogen bonds and weak monohydrogen bonds, the organohydrogel obtained an outstanding tensile strength of 2.0 ± 0.13 MPa and toughness of 16.0 ± 1.0 MJ m –3, as well as desirable self-healing ability. The organohydrogel strain sensor has a high gauge factor (GF) of 15.08 along with a large detection range (0–1159%), demonstrating its outstanding sensitivity. It was successfully applied for manipulator gesture detection in harsh environments, showing excellent detection resolution and sensing stability in a wide temperature range (−20 to 50 °C). This work provides a new avenue for preparing multifunctional LM composite gels, showing great promise for next-generation wearable electronics.