Stress-Assisted Networking Enabled Highly Conductive Liquid Metal-Based PVP-Fructose Gel with Multi-intelligent Properties for Stretchable Electronics

Abstract

Conductive hydrogel materials are garnering attention for their high flexibility and biocompatibility, establishing them as promising candidates for use in wearable and stretchable electronics. Despite the high conductivity of many reported hydrogel materials, they generally lack intelligent properties such as degradability, stretchability, self-adhesion, and self-healing. This study proposes a stress-assisted conductive networking mechanism for liquid metal (LM)-based gel, which is attributed to the internal stress generated by volume shrinkage during the liquid–solid phase transition, and operates without the requirement of additional energy input. Based on this mechanism, LM particles are subsequently incorporated into a polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)-fructose composite (PFC) to fabricate a highly conductive LM-PFC gel. This gel not only achieves high conductivity but also demonstrates excellent intelligent properties, including high stretchability, degradability, high mechanical strength, self-adhesion, self-conforming ability, recyclability, and self-healing ability, which make it highly suitable for applications such as monitoring bioelectric signals, thereby highlighting its immense potential in stretchable electronics and wearable technologies.