Preparation of elastic conductor with high stretchability and stable conductivity under strain via pre-stretching and spraying approach

Recently, elastic conductors have attracted much attention due to their widespread use in many fields, such as robots, retractable displays and antennas, etc. However, such conductors must be resilient so that electronic signals can be transmitted efficiently and reliably under deformation. In this paper, spraying process is combined with pre-stretching to obtain elastic conductors with corrugated structure. Through such structure, the change of electrical conductivity under deformation is rather small (GF<1). Larger pre-stretching makes the sample more stable under larger strain. As for the sample with 100% pre-stretching and sprayed with 0.1g CNT/0.1g PDMS, a low GF of 0.6 at 100% strain, a conductivity of about 267 s/m and an excellent dynamic durability (over 1000 cycles) is illustrated.

Automated summary

This study investigates the use of a combination of spraying process and pre-stretching to prepare elastic conductors with a corrugated structure, demonstrating that this structure plays a significant role in stabilizing electrical conductivity under deformation.