Low cost and highly conductive elastic composites for flexible and printable electronics

Abstract

Printable elastic conductive composites with high conductivity and flexibility have exciting applications in burgeoning flexible electronics. However, the low-cost fabrication of flexible conductors is still a great challenge, especially they can be directly printed on various substrates even including the wearable woven textiles, and give perfect printed patterns. Herein, we report a facile and low-cost strategy to fabricate directly printable elastic conductive composites with a conductivity of 4.12 × 10⁴ S m⁻¹ at a low silver loading of 42.88 wt%. The elastic conductor is simply comprised of core–shell polystyrene/silver (PS@Ag) hybrid conductive particles with an average size of 5.86 μm and a viscous polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix. The viscous mixture pastes can be easily fabricated into conductive films or directly printed on various substrates to obtain elastic conductive circuits with arbitrary geometries and high resolution by the screen printing method. The fabricated elastic PS@Ag/PDMS conductor exhibits high electrical conductivity and good electrical stability under vigorous cycles of mechanical deformations, such as bending, crimping and stretching. These merits make it a competitive candidate for flexible circuits and wearable electronic devices.