Soft Electronics

A book chapter on liquid-metal materials, fabrication, and applications in flexible and stretchable electronics.

Stretchable optical filters combine liquid metal circuits, thermochromic pigments, and phosphorescent particles to convert electrical heating and mechanical deformation into controllable light emission.

In this review, we systematically summarize the attributes, fabrication methods, and applications of gallium-based liquid metal particles. Existing challenges and future opportunities regarding liquid metal particles are discussed herein.

We presented a completely soft, stretchable silicone composite doped with thermochromic pigments and innervated with liquid metal. The ability to deform the liquid metal couples geometric changes to Joule heating, thus enabling tunable thermo-mechanochromic sensing of touch and strain.

We designed a liquid metal based composite that can change from non-conductive states to fully conductive states with mechanical pressure. Therefore, we can simply use a pen to create arbitrary conductive circuits on a soft substrate.

We developed a super facile way to pattern liquid metal into complicated microstructures with branches and dead-ends. The process only took less than 1 minute.

We injected liquid metal into the core of hollow and extremely stretchable elastomeric fibers and the resulting fibers could be intertwined into a helix to fabricate capacitive sensors of torsion, strain, and touch.

We explored an extremely facile method to fabricate metallic wires at room temperature.

We designed a liquid metal based composite that can change from non-conductive states to fully conductive states with mechanical pressure. Therefore, we can simply use a pen to create arbitrary conductive circuits on a soft substrate.

We demonstrate a novel method for controlling the flow of liquid metal in microchannels simply by applying a modest voltage to the metal relative to a counter electrode placed in the outlet.