6th Bioinspired Materials 2022
Lecture
23.03.2022
A fabrication of highly porous flexible composite film with curved hierarchical microstructure design for biomimetic soft electronics application
ZS

Zhander Vohr Soreño

Universität Bayreuth

Soreño, Z.V. (Speaker)¹; Apsite, I.¹; Ionov, L.¹
¹University of Bayreuth
Vorschau
21 Min. Untertitel (CC)

Despite significant efforts to improve the performance of flexible electronics and sensors, as evidenced by recent advances in the development of innovative material and structure concepts, the development of a substrate that overcomes critical issues such as compliancy, breathability, conformability, and lightweight is still ongoing. Recent studies describing synthetic film-forming polymers like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyurethane (PU), polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), and polyimide (PI) shows good mechanical properties that are similar to human skin mechanical properties, but important aspects such as compliancy, breathability, conformability, and lightweight are underrepresented. Electrospun nanofiber-based flexible materials have lately gained a lot of interest due to their unique features such as breathability, large surface area, and conformability. Elastomeric substrates are widely explored among common soft polymer candidates due to their potential to be designed with geometric morphologies for improved stretchability. Due to their unique mechanical response, horseshoe-microstructured hierarchical lattice materials have recently emerged as an exciting material for improving stretchability, flexibility, and sensitivity. Surprisingly, these morphologies reflect comparable stress-strain behaviors of natural biological tissues’ nonlinear J-shaped stress-strain profile. We present an integrated simple fabrication of highly-porous fibrous-based flexible composite material with tailored geometric morphologies via printing of a stiff melt electrowritten (MEW) curved microstructure on an elastic electrospun (ES) film. A 180° microstructure pattern may be printed via melt-electrowriting, which allows unique highly controlled fiber production using computer-aided direct-writing of melted polymer. A promising morphology and surface design of a composite film fabricated in an ES-MEW-ES approach demonstrated a synergistic effect. In comparison to pristine nanofiber film, the stress-strain profile of the composite material showed elaborated J-shaped behavior using tensile testing. The successful physical attachment of MEW and ES fibers, as well as the wavy and wrinkled composite material’s surface was revealed by Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) analysis. Using a combination of MEW and ES, we developed a straightforward technique for fabricating highly porous 10-45 µm-thick composite film which exhibits non-linear J-shaped stress-strain behavior.

Abstract

Abstract

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