Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Elmo (Electrical Modulation of Elastic Moduli)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28
How could a textile change its feel upon the push of a button? While we are accustomed to visual displays and loudspeakers, interactive tactile perception largely eludes our experience. Electronic textiles that change their pliability and texture would allow for communication using our sense of touch. Potential applications abound, from human-machine interfaces for robotics to new forms of virtual reality. To facilitate such a tuneable mechanical response, materials are needed whose stiffness can be switched electrically. This project will use conjugated polymers to realise materials that can be electrically switched between soft and hard. Conjugated polymers can be anything from stretchable to tough. This project will establish that chemical and electrochemical doping allow to strongly alter the elastic modulus of soft conjugated polymers. Two parallel methodologies, based on electrophoresis and electrochemistry, will be explored to realise a reversible change from soft-as-skin to hard-as-bone upon application of an electrical stimulus. Finally, the developed materials will be integrated into prototype electronic textile devices that can undergo a reversible change in pliability and texture. The explored materials science concepts will open up a new line of research in the blossoming field of organic electronics, while the application-oriented part of the project opens new horizons for the interdisciplinary field of wearable electronics.
The impact of doping on the mechanical properties of conjugated polymers has been summarized in a tutorial review (Paleti et al., Chem. Soc. Rev. 2024). A new type of air-stable n-type yarn for electronic textiles has been developed (Craighero et al., Adv. Sci. 2024). A new methodology has been developed that permits to monitor the electronic mobility of conjugated polymers during oxidation/reduction cycles of an organic electrochemical transistor (Kim et al., Nature Commun. 2024).
The developed method to monitor the electronic mobility during electrochemical oxidation/reduction now provides the field with a critical new tool for studying transport processes in conjugated polymers.