A research group led by Prof. LI Runwei and HU Benlin at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) designed a facile and efficient approach to fabricate elastic relaxor ferroelectrics via thiol-ene click reaction.
The study was published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, and was selected as “Very Important Paper”.
Ferroelectrics, which possess switchable spontaneous polarization within a certain temperature range, play a pivotal role in various applications, such as non-volatile memories, sensors, and actuators. With the development of wearable and implantable electronic products, the elastification of ferroelectric materials emerges as a highly promising direction.
The research group has proposed a slight crosslinking method for the intrinsic elastification of ferroelectric materials in Science. By precisely controlling the crosslinking density, they successfully achieved elasticity while minimizing the impact of structural changes on material crystallinity, thereby pioneering a new interdisciplinary field—elastic ferroelectrics. Subsequently, the group has conducted comprehensive researches on elastic ferroelectric materials, yielding a series of relevant breakthroughs.
In addition to thermal crosslinking methods for elastic ferroelectrics, the group developed an optical crosslinking method for the elasticization of relaxor ferroelectrics, which exhibit high electromechanical coupling responses and thus hold great potential for driving and energy storage applications.
The thiol-ene click reaction was employed to achieve the intrinsic elasticization of relaxor ferroelectrics at room temperature by introducing double bonds in poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-chlorotrifluoroethylene) P(VDF-CTFE). The resulting crosslinked film exhibited excellent mechanical resilience, with a fracture elongation of 260%.
Besides, the film can maintain 80% strain recovery after 3000 cycles at a 50% strain, demonstrating superior fatigue resistance thus comparable to commercial fluororubbers. Furthermore, analysis results verified the relaxor ferroelectric properties of the elastic films.
A fully elastic ferroelectric device with the elastic relaxor ferroelectric film as the dielectric layer was fabricated, showing stable ferroelectric responses under strains up to 70%.
This work offers a new avenue for the exploration and innovation of elastic ferroelectrics for flexible electronics.
The study was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LR24E030003), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51931011 and 52127803), and the Zhejiang Province Qianjiang Talent Program (ZJ-QJRC-2020-32).
Fig. The mechanism of preparing elastic relaxor ferroelectrics through thiol-ene click reaction (Image by NIMTE)
Contact
HU Benlin
Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering
Email: hubenlin@nimte.ac.cn