Gas permeable electronic material adds comfort to wearables

The breathable material from a team at North Carolina State University (NC State) provides comfort by allowing sweat and volatile organic compounds to evaporate away from the skin. Their findings are published in ACS Nano.

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"The gas permeability is the big advance over earlier stretchable electronics," said Yong Zhu, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. "But the method we used for creating the material is also important because it's a simple process that would be easy to scale up."

According to NC State, the researchers used the so-called breath figure method to create a stretchable polymer film featuring an even distribution of holes. The film is coated by dipping it in a solution containing silver nanowires. The material is then heat-pressed to seal the nanowires.

"The resulting film shows an excellent combination of electric conductivity, optical transmittance and water-vapour permeability," Zhu said in a statement. "And because the silver nanowires are embedded just below the surface of the polymer, the material also exhibits excellent stability in the presence of sweat and after long-term wear."