Ionic Gel Paper with Long-Term Bendable Electrical Robustness for Use in Flexible Electroluminescent Devices
Roll-up computer screens and other flexible electronics are getting closer to reality as scientists improve upon a growing number of components that can bend and stretch. One team now reports in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces another development that can contribute to this evolution: a low-cost conductive paper that would be easy to manufacture on a large scale.
Current flexible electronic prototypes are commonly built using polymer thin films. But the cost of these films becomes a factor when they are scaled up. To address this issue, scientists have turned to paper, which is renewable, biodegradable and a fraction of the cost of polymer thin films. The downside of paper is that it’s not conductive, and efforts so far to infuse it with this property have been hindered by scalability and expense. Bin Su, Junfei Tian and colleagues wanted to come up with a new approach.
Using a conventional roller process that’s easy to scale up, the researchers coated paper with soft ionic gels to make it conductive. They sandwiched an emissive film between two layers of the ionic gel paper. When they applied a voltage, the device glowed blue, indicating that electricity was being conducted. It also showed electrical durability, withstanding more than 5,000 cycles of bending and unbending with negligible changes in performance and lasting for more than two months. The researchers say their conductive paper, which costs about $1.30 per square meter and could be fabricated at a rate of 30 meters per minute, could become an integral part of future flexible electronics.
Learn more: Conductive paper could enable future flexible electronics
[osd_subscribe categories=’flexible-electronics’ placeholder=’Email Address’ button_text=’Subscribe Now for any new posts on the topic “FLEXIBLE ELECTRONICS’]
The Latest on: Conductive paper
[google_news title=”” keyword=”conductive paper” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]- B₄C–TiB₂ composite ceramics with adjustable mechanical and electrical properties
In recent years, electro-conductive composite ceramics have gradually become a research hotspot in the functionalization of structural ceramics. However, the improvement of conductivity is generally ...
- Industrial Tape Market Booming: Set to Reach US$ 19.1 Billion by 2033 – Capitalize on the Growth
The global industrial tape market registered an astonishing CAGR of 6.8% in the historical period between 2018 and 2022. The global market is anticipated to reach US$ 19.1 billion by 2033. It is ...
- Edge passivation improves shingled solar module performance
A group of scientists from the Germany's Fraunhofer ISE has proposed a new metric to assess the performance of shingled solar panels. They also applied the so-called passivated edge technology (PET) ...
- Almost 100%-recyclable circuit board turns to jelly for disassembly
A new type of printed circuit board (PCB) could drastically reduce the amount of electronic waste that ends up in landfills. Although most PCBs are difficult to recycle, such is not the case with this ...
- Bacteria 'nanowires' could help develop green electronics
Engineered protein filaments originally produced by bacteria have been modified by scientists to conduct electricity. In a study published recently in the journal Small, researchers revealed that ...
via Google News and Bing News