Fabrication of multifunctional eutectogels for wearable sensing applications

Abstract

Eutectogels based on deep eutectic solvents (DES) offer high elasticity and ionic conductivity, making them promising soft conductors for self-powered sensors and flexible human–computer interfaces. However, integrating multifunctional and multi-responsive properties in a simple, sustainable manner remains challenging. Herein, we use a binary solvent strategy to construct a multi-crosslinking network of the P(AA-co-Am)@GG-DES eutectogel. The prepared eutectogel exhibits exceptional mechanical properties, including a tensile strain of 470.28% and stress of 54.91 kPa. Further, it exhibits fast self-healing and strong adhesion with multiple substrates due to its diverse hydrogen bonding interactions and accessible functional groups. It also exhibits broad temperature tolerance (−80 °C to 40 °C) according to the DSC analysis, but the working range is from −15 °C to 40 °C, ensuring stable output and exceptional resistance to environmental factors, such as freezing and drying, and enabling long-term stability. The synthesized eutectogel exhibits high sensitivity with a gauge factor of 9.23, making it suitable for detecting both subtle and large deformations. These distinct characteristics make it an ideal strain sensor to accurately identify physical movements such as those associated with health conditions and capable of Morse code communication. This work presents an environmentally friendly and low-cost method for fabricating DES-based multifunctional eutectogels for wearable electronics and human-machine interactions.