Abstract:
Hydrogel materials that combine excellent mechanical properties with stable conductivity are crucial for achieving long-term service operation in flexible wearable sensors. However, conventional conductive hydrogels generally face the bottleneck of incompatibility between high strength and low hysteresis. To simultaneously endow hydrogels with high elastic recovery and stable ionic conductivity, a low-hysteresis, elastic dissipation-enhancing strategy based on dynamic metal coordination crosslinking is proposed. By introducing calcium ions (Ca
2+) into a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/polyacrylamide (AAm) interpenetrating double network, a PAC hydrogel with outstanding mechanical and conductive properties is fabricated. The results show that the PAC hydrogel exhibits an elastic modulus of 7.37 MPa, a hysteresis ratio of only 6% at 200% strain, and a high conductivity of 1.41 S/m. The sensor based on the PAC hydrogel demonstrates excellent sensitivity, fast response time, and stable cyclic signal performance, enabling effective monitoring of various physiological signals and showing broad application prospects in wearable health monitoring and human-machine interaction.