Elastic and Stretchable Functional Fibers: A Review of Materials, Fabrication Methods, and Applications

Elastic and stretchable functional fibers have drawn attentions from wide research field because of their unique advantages including high dynamic bending elasticity, stretchability and high mechanic strength. Lots of efforts have been made to find promising soft materials and improve the processing methods to fabricate the elastomer fibers with controllable fiber geometries and designable functionalities. Significant progress has been made and various interdisciplinary applications have been demonstrated based on their unique mechanical performance. A series of remarkable applications, involving biomedicine, optics, electronics, human machine interfaces etc., have been successfully achieved. Here, we summarize main processing methods to fabricate soft and stretchable functional fibers using different types of elastic materials, which are either widely used or specifically developed. We also introduce some representative applications of multifunctional elastic fibers to reveal this promising research area. All these reported applications indicate that the fast innovated interdisciplinary area is of great potential and inspire more remarkable ideas in fiber sensing, soft electronics, functional fiber integration and other related research fields. Graphic abstract