Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Electronic devices of the future will be built on soft, polymeric materials, making them stretchable, twistable, and deformable. This stretchability enables applications impossible to achieve with current rigid materials, such as flexible lighting, displays, and solar cells; soft, pressure-sensitive skins for robotics; and conformable biomedical sensors that can be laminated on skin or implanted into the human body to detect and display information. Research in stretchable electronics, however, has exclusively used stretchable silicone rubber materials that are highly permeable to oxygen and moisture, which severely degrade the organic electronic materials in the devices and drastically shorten device lifetime. Our research aims to solve this problem by implementing a different stretchable material - butyl rubber - that is notable for its impermeability to moisture and oxygen. We will demonstrate that the impermeability and soft mechanical properties of butyl rubber can produce stretchable organic light-emitting devices and organic solar cells that achieve long-term operation under ambient conditions.