The last decade has seen significant progress in the development of flexible electronics and sensors, particularly for display technologies and healthcare applications. Advancements in scalable manufacturing, miniaturization, and integration have further extended the use of this new class of devices to smart agriculture, where multimodal sensors can be seamlessly attached to plants for continuous and remote monitoring. Among the various types of sensing devices for agriculture, flexible mechanical sensors have emerged as promising candidates for monitoring vital parameters, including growth rates and water flow, providing a new avenue for understanding plant health and growth under varied environmental conditions. This perspective provides a snapshot of recent progress in this exciting and unconventional area of research and highlights potential opportunities for the future.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s24247995 | DOI Listing |
Commun Biol
January 2025
Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
Form-function relationships often have tradeoffs: if a material is tough, it is often inflexible, and vice versa. This is particularly relevant for the elephant trunk, where the skin should be protective yet elastic. To investigate how this is achieved, we used classical histochemical staining and second harmonic generation microscopy to describe the morphology and composition of elephant trunk skin.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcc Chem Res
January 2025
Department of Chemistry, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom.
ConspectusThe emergence of two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), has sparked significant interest due to their unique physicochemical, optical, electrical, and mechanical properties. Furthermore, their atomically thin nature enables mechanical flexibility, high sensitivity, and simple integration onto flexible substrates, such as paper and plastic.The surface chemistry of a nanomaterial determines many of its properties, such as its chemical and catalytic activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCarbohydr Polym
March 2025
State Key Laboratory of Efficient Production of Forest Resources, Beijing 100083, China.
Conductive hydrogels have promising applications for flexible strain sensors. However, most hydrogels have poor tensile strength and are susceptible to damage, significantly impeding their potential for further application. Wood has been used to reinforce hydrogels, significantly enhancing their strength and dimensional stability.
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March 2025
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Textile and Flexible Interconnection of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou 310018, China. Electronic address:
The environmental challenges linked to petroleum-based polymers have accelerated the search for alternative materials like polylactic acid (PLA). Diverse nanofillers, ranging from inorganic to organic and hybrid inorganic/organic varieties, are employed to bolster PLA performance. Yet, non-synergistic nanofillers often underperform due to inadequate dispersion and singular functionality within the PLA matrix.
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March 2025
Beijing Key Laboratory of Lignocellulosic Chemistry, MOE Engineering Research Center of Forestry Biomass Materials and Energy, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China; State Key Laboratory of Efficient Production of Forest Resources, Beijing 100083, China. Electronic address:
Integrating liquid metal (LM) with wood fibers for flexible paper electronics is intriguing yet extremely challenging due to poor mechanical performance. Here, we disclose a hemicellulose trapping strategy to achieve exceptional ultrastrong and tough LM-based paper electronics. Holocellulose nanofibrils (HCNFs) with hemicellulose retention of approximately 20 % are found to effectively entrap nanoscale LM within the fibril network, analogous to spider silk capturing small water droplets.
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