Smart Antifreeze Hydrogels with Abundant Hydrogen Bonding for Conductive Flexible Sensors

Recently, flexible sensors based on conductive hydrogels have been widely used in human health monitoring, human movement detection and soft robotics due to their excellent flexibility, high water content, good biocompatibility. However, traditional conductive hydrogels tend to freeze and lose their flexibility at low temperature, which greatly limits their application in a low temperature environment. Herein, according to the mechanism that multi-hydrogen bonds can inhibit ice crystal formation by forming hydrogen bonds with water molecules, we used butanediol (BD) and N-hydroxyethyl acrylamide (HEAA) monomer with a multi-hydrogen bond structure to construct LiCl/p(HEAA-co-BD) conductive hydrogel with antifreeze property. The results indicated that the prepared LiCl/p(HEAA-co-BD) conductive hydrogel showed excellent antifreeze property with a low freeze point of -85.6 °C. Therefore, even at -40 °C, the hydrogel can still stretch up to 400% with a tensile stress of ~450 KPa. Moreover, the hydrogel exhibited repeatable adhesion property (~30 KPa), which was attributed to the existence of multiple hydrogen bonds. Furthermore, a simple flexible sensor was fabricated by using LiCl/p(HEAA-co-BD) conductive hydrogel to detect compression and stretching responses. The sensor had excellent sensitivity and could monitor human body movement.