Elastic, conductive, polymeric hydrogels and sponges

Abstract

As a result of inherent rigidity of the conjugated macromolecular chains resulted from the delocalized π-electron system along the polymer backbone, it has been a huge challenge to make conducting polymer hydrogels elastic by far. Herein elastic and conductive polypyrrole hydrogels with only conducting polymer as the continuous phase have been simply synthesized in the indispensable conditions of 1) mixed solvent, 2) deficient oxidant, and 3) monthly secondary growth. The elastic mechanism and oxidative polymerization mechanism on the resulting PPy hydrogels have been discussed. The resulting hydrogels show some novel properties, e.g., shape memory elasticity, fast functionalization with various guest objects, and fast removal of organic infectants from aqueous solutions, all of which cannot be observed from traditional non-elastic conducting polymer counterparts. What's more, light-weight, elastic, and conductive organic sponges with excellent stress-sensing behavior have been successfully achieved via using the resulting polypyrrole hydrogels as precursors.