Topological network design toward high-performance vegetable oil-based elastomers

As a kind of bio-derived feedstock,vegetable oil(VO)shows great potential to replace petroleum-based monomers to develop sustainable polymer materials because of its easy availability,low cost,bio-renewable,and environmentally friendly nature.However,due to the high cross-linking density and amorphous nature,directly cured VOs generally tend to be brittle and weak.To date,it is still difficult to adopt VOs and their derivatives as structural materials to prepare high-performance elastomers.To address this important issue,amulti-scale topology design strategy was proposed in this work.First,topology regulation and functionalization of VO-based networks were realized by managing functional groups proportion during the bulk polymerization of epoxidized soybean oil with dimer fatty acids.Furthermore,a second polymer(SN)network was introduced into the VO-based network as a protective layer via interfacial cross-links.The generated VO-based elastomers(VOEs)exhibit unprecedented comprehensive properties(VO content≥70 wt.%,T_(g)as low as−24.4℃,toughness up to 6.8 MJ/m^(3)).Besides,the VOEs also exhibit excellent reprocessability and self-healing capability.Overall,this work developed a novel kind of VOEs with significant comprehensive advantages and provided important inspiration for the preparation of high-performance elastomers throughmulti-scale topology regulation.

Flexible antibacterial degradable bioelastomer nanocomposites for ultrasensitive human–machine interaction sensing enabled by machine learning

Flexible wearables have attracted extensive interests for personal human motion sensing,intelligent disease diagnosis,and multifunctional electronic skins.How-ever,the reported flexible sensors,mostly exhibited narrow detection range,low sensitivity,limited degradability to aggravate environmental pollution from vast electronic wastes,and poor antibacterial performance to hardly improve skin dis-comfort and skin inflammation from bacterial growth under long-term wearing.Herein,bioinspired from human skin featuring highly sensitive tactile sensation with spinous microstructures for amplifying sensing sensitivity between epidermis and dermis,a wearable antibacterial degradable electronics is prepared from degrad-able elastomeric substrate with MXene-coated spinous microstructures templated from lotus leaf assembled with the interdigitated electrode.The degradable elas-tomer is facilely obtained with tunable modulus to match the modulus of human skin with improved hydrophilicity for rapid degradation.The as-obtained sensor displays ultra-low detection limit(0.2 Pa),higher sensitivity(up to 540.2 kPa^(-1)),outstand-ing cycling stability(>23,000 cycles),a wide detection range,robust degradability,and excellent antibacterial capability.Facilitated by machine learning,the collected sensing signals from the integrated sensors on volunteer's fingers to the related American Sign Language are effectively recognized with an accuracy up to 99%,showing excellent potential in wireless human movement sensing and smart machine learning-enabled human-machine interaction.