Flickr, MilitaryHealthResearchers at Stanford University in California have created a flexible, pressure-sensitive, and self-healing polymer that could find use as an “electronic skin” for robots and biomimetic prostheses, according to a report out this week (November 11) in Nature Nanotechnology.
Materials scientists have been developing “epidermal electronics” for the past 10 years. They have produced circuits thin and flexible enough to be attached to skin, and sensitive enough to record heartbeats and brain activity, for example. At the same time, chemists have been working on self-healing polymers—plastics that can be activated by heat, light, or gentle contact to repair themselves after breakage.
Now, a team at Stanford has combined these two properties by incorporating nickel atoms into a self-healing polymer. The resulting material is sensitive to applied forces such as pressure or twisting because these forces alter the distance between the nickel atoms, which affects how easy it is for electrons to jump between them—and thus changes the electric resistance of the material.
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