Buckled Fiber Conductors with Resistance Stability under Strain

The availability of fiber conductors that can be stretched to large extents without significantly changing resistance or conductivity could enable the advances of elastic conductors as electronic interconnects, electronic skins, stretchable sensors, wearable systems, and medical robots. Therefore, the preparation of fiber conductors with high stretchability is crucial to the development of flexible electronic devices. This review summarizes the advances in constructing fiber conductors with an emphasis on recent developments of buckled structural design, fabrication methodologies, and strategies, with the ultimate goal of achieving good stability of resistance or conductivity at large strains. This review classifies the buckled fiber conductors into inner buckling and outer buckling, and related examples are summarized, providing a context that buckled fiber conductors are geared towards applications in electrical interconnects, wearable systems, and smart medical robotics. The present challenges in this area are critically evaluated and our perspectives for improving the performance of the buckled fiber conductors for future applications are presented.