Multifunctional bacterial cellulose-based organohydrogels with long-term environmental stability

Sensitive strain sensors have attracted more attention due to their applications in health monitoring and human-computer interaction. However, the problems existing in conventional hydrogels, such as inherent brittleness, freezing at low temperature, low toughness, and water evaporation, have greatly hindered the practical applications. In order to solve the above problems, herein, we designed dual network multifunctionality organohydrogels using polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) covalent cross-linking polymer as the first network, the bacterial celluloses (BCs) and calcium chloride by ligand binding as the second network. The prepared organohydrogels showed good conductivity and sensitivity over a wide temperature range (-20 similar to 40 degrees C), and maintained long-term stability (>15 days) in the air. In addition, the dynamic combination of BCs-Ca2+ and hydrogen bonds in the binary system further endows the organohydrogels with excellent tensile strength (approximate to 1.0 MPa), tensile strain (approximate to 1300%), toughness (approximate to 6.2 MJ m(-3)), conductivity (3.4 S m(-1)), gauge factor (approximate to 1.24), adhesion (approximate to 0.3 MPa), and self-healing properties (self-healing tensile strain to 632%). Therefore, this organohydrogel has potential candidates for flexible electronic skin, motion monitoring, and soft robotics. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.