Stable "Conductive Play-Doh" Suggests a Whole New Way to Build Robust, Flexible Electronics
Novel material can be processed at room-temperatures as simply as being "smushed" into place, and could mean big things for electronics.
Researchers from the University of Chicago have created a material they describe as "like conductive Play-Doh," combining the manufacturability of plastic with the conductivity of a metal — and hope it could lead to exciting new breakthroughs in electronics.
“In principle, this opens up the design of a whole new class of materials that conduct electricity, are easy to shape, and are very robust in everyday conditions," claims John Anderson, associate professor of chemistry senior author of the study. "Essentially, it suggests new possibilities for an extremely important technological group of materials," adds first author Jiaze Xie of the team's work.
The team's work focuses on a material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, as with a plastic, but somehow still conduct electricity like the ordered fragments found in a metal — something previously thought impossible in a stable material.
The team's inspiration came from work 50 years old, in which organic materials were doped with different atoms and electrons to conduct electricity — combining the flexibility and ease of processing of materials like plastic with the conductivity of metal. Earlier attempts at the process, however, proved unstable — which is where Xie's experiments with nickel atoms, carbon, and sulfur come in.
"We heated it, chilled it, exposed it to air and humidity, and even dripped acid and base on it, and nothing happened," Xie explains of the material the team developed, which Anderson describes as "almost like conductive Play-Doh — you can smush it into place and it conducts electricity."
The team wasn't quite sure, however, how the material works. After repeated experimentation, simulation, and theory, the principle is that the material forms lasagna-like layers allowing for the free flow of electrons — a flow that remains even if the layers are moved or rotated, so long as they're touching. The result, the team claims, is a fundamentally new design principle for electronics — allowing for devices that would previously have required metal-melting temperatures for processing to be made at room temperature, and potentially finding use in new forms of conductive ink for printing and direct application.
The team's paper has been published in the journal Nature under closed-access terms, with an open-access preprint PDF available through Research Square.
