Stretchable Ultraviolet Curable Ionic Conductive Elastomers for Digital Light Processing Based 3D Printing

Abstract Highly stretchable and transparent ionic conducting materials enable electronic devices to have a distinguishable working mechanism and performances from the conventional electronics. Compared with hydrogels which contain large amounts of water to dissolve ions, ionic conductive elastomers (ICEs) are solvent‐free, and intrinsically immune from dehydration. However, the current manufacturing technologies constrain the ICE‐based ionotronics to simple and bulk geometries with single material, which greatly limits functionality and performance of ICEs‐based ionotronics. Herein, a stretchable ultraviolet curable ICEs (SUV‐ICEs) for 3D printing approach to fabricate complex 3D flexible electronics is reported. The developed SUV‐ICEs are highly stretchable and thermally stable. Using a self‐built DLP‐based 3D printer, that is able to print 3D flexible electronics consisting of SUV‐ICE covalently bonded with other dielectric elastomer, such as SUV‐ICE strain sensors, and a flexible mini‐keyboard.