Polysaccharide-modified conductive hydrogel for flexible electronic devices

Abstract In recent years, conductive hydrogels, as an ideal flexible material, have quite broad application prospects in various flexible electronics fields, such as flexible supercapacitors, flexible batteries, and flexible sensors. However, mechanical stress such as stretching, fracture, and compression will affect the performance of conductive hydrogel during the application, which limits its further application. Polysaccharides, such as cellulose and chitosan, are widely distributed and easy-to-obtain biological macromolecules, which contain a large number of polar functional groups (carboxyl, amino, etc.), which can be formed with polymer hydrogel molecular chains, thereby improving the performance of the hydrogel. Herein, we prepared a kind of conductive hydrogel with high toughness, high conductivity, and self-adhesion by introducing carboxymethyl chitosan and maltose to induce a dynamic Schiff base reaction in the hydrogel. It is conceived that this study proposed a potential approach for the progress of conductive hydrogels in various flexible electronics fields.