Electric wedgies? Elastic material maintains conductivity when stretched

Elastic electric circuits made from silver nanoparticles printed onto elastic fibers.

Unyong Jeong/ Yonsei University

A new stretchy material conducts electricity about as well as bare metal and could be used to make large-scale stretchy electric circuits for displays, transistors, or lighting.

The biggest challenge for making stretchy electric circuits is maintaining conductivity when the material is pulled taut. One option for doing this is to load a block of elastic material with metal nanoparticles that can conduct electricity. But at the high concentrations of nanoparticles needed for good conductivity, the materials become brittle and easily broken. Those breaks then separate the nanoparticles and disrupt the conductivity of the material.

Unyong Jeong, at Yonsei University in Seoul; Jongjin Park, at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology; and their colleagues sidestepped this problem by spinning a stretchy material (made from a block of rubbery butadiene sandwiched between lengths of polystyrene) into fibrous mats. A two-step process filled the mats with silver nanoparticles to make the material conductive.

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