Empowering soft conductive elastomers with self-reinforcement and remarkable resilience phase-locking ions.

Endowing soft and long-range stretchable elastomers with exceptional strength, resilience, and ion-conductivity is crucial for high-performance flexible sensors. However, achieving this entails significant challenges due to intrinsic yet mutually exclusive structural factors. In this work, a series of self-reinforcing ion-conductive elastomers (SRICEs) is thus designed to meet the advanced but challenging requirements.

Negative Enthalpy Variation Drives Rapid Recovery in Thermoplastic Elastomer.

The mechanism behind the resilience of polymeric materials, typically attributed to the well-established entropy elasticity, often ignores the contribution of enthalpy variation (ΔH), because it is based on the assumption of an ideal chain. However, this model does not fully account for the reduced resilience of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) during long-range deformation, which is mainly caused by the dynamics of physical crosslink networks. Such reduction is undesirable for long-range stretchable TPU considering its wide application range.