Stretchable Electronic Devices with Improved Mechanical Properties and Lifetimes

未来的电子设备将是可拉伸、可扭曲和可变形的。这种可伸缩性将使目前的刚性材料无法实现的应用，如柔性照明和显示器。它甚至将为全新的应用开辟道路，例如“电子皮肤”，以及可显示生物医学图像和信息的符合要求的健康监测设备和植入物。尽管目前的研究已经产生了一些令人兴奋的可伸展电子设备的演示，但研究人员将这些设备完全建立在一种可伸展材料上，这种材料不能提供对潮湿和氧气的保护，而潮湿和氧气会降低有机发光二极管和有机薄膜晶体管等设备的质量。目前的研究项目将以一种简单而直接的方式解决这个问题：它将使用一种可拉伸的材料-丁基橡胶-这种材料以其不透湿和不透氧而闻名。使用丁基橡胶的好处将通过制造可伸缩的有机发光器件来展示，这些器件可以在环境条件下实现长期运行。

Electronic devices of the future will be stretchable, twistable, and deformable. This stretchability will enable applications impossible to achieve with current rigid materials, such as flexible lighting and displays. It will even open the way to completely new applications, such as "electronic skin" and conformable health-monitoring devices and implants that display biomedical images and information. Although current research has produced some exciting demonstrations of stretchable electronic devices, researchers have exclusively built these devices on a stretchable material that does not provide protection from moisture and oxygen, which degrade devices such as organic light-emitting diodes and organic thin-film transistors. The present research project will solve this problem in a simple and straightforward way: It will implement the use of a stretchable material - butyl rubber - that is notable for its impermeability to moisture and oxygen. The benefit of using butyl rubber will be demonstrated by fabricating stretchable organic light-emitting devices that achieve long-term operation under ambient conditions.