Multifunctional Liquid Metal Materials for Integration of Soft Electronics

Multifunctional soft materials and interfaces create intriguing new opportunities for electronics, robots, and human-machine interfaces through e-textiles and e-skins. However, one of the largest challenges in this area is the robust mechanical and electrical integration across heterogeneous interfaces. In this presentation, I will address this challenge with several recent advances utilizing liquid metal-based composites to enable a spectrum of reversible to permanent attachment and integration with programmable electrical, thermal, and adhesive behavior. I will discuss how control over composite microstructure can dramatically tune functional, mechanical, and adhesive properties of these systems. This includes material and fabrication strategies to interface soft electronics with rigid functional components both in-plane and thru-plane for soft and flexible devices. Fundamental adhesion mechanisms will also be highlighted with discussion of design strategies for adhesion performance. These approaches provide model systems to study fundamental material properties while enabling soft electronics, soft robots, and advanced adhesives for a variety of applications.