Liquid-Free Ionic Conductive Elastomers with High Mechanical Strength and Rapid Healable Ability

Liquid-free ionic conductive elastomers (ICEs) are used in flexible electronic components because they solve liquid leakage and evaporation problems. In everyday use, we often need high mechanical strength and rapid self-healing performance. Here, we report the development of liquid-free ICEs with high mechanical properties (>1 MPa) and rapid healable ability using rationally designed polymerizable deep eutectic solvents (PDESs). 2-Acrylamide-2-methylpropanesulfonic acid (AMPS) has been introduced as a hard monomer in PDES systems, because the AMPS monomer contains the sulfonic acid group with strong hydrogen bond interaction. Through a rapid UV curing process, PDES comonomers can be rapidly polymerized into high performance ICEs in the presence of a photoinitiator. Due to the strong hydrogen-bonding interactions and entanglements between soft and hard chains among the components, the prepared ICEs show rapid healable properties (healing efficiency up to 86.5% in 4 h) while maintaining high mechanical strength (tensile stress up to 5.7 MPa). In addition, the ICEs also have high transparency (average light transmittance up to 92%), good ionic conductivity (0.2–0.7 × 10–2 S/m), and rapid electrical self-healing properties (within 2 s) in the absence of external stimulation. On the basis of their excellent versatility, they can be used as strain sensors to detect human motion. We believe that the study of PDES-based ICEs will provide a method for the development of flexible electronics.