A review on the active thermal management researches of epidermal electronic devices

Abstract

As a representative of flexible electronics, epidermal electronic devices (EEDs) are extremely suitable for integration with biological tissues, such as human epidermis benefiting from the advantages of ultrathin, stretchability, and perfectly conformal attachment. Considering the low thermal conductivity of the EEDs polymer material, a large amount of undesired heat accumulation is prone to occur at the EEDs/skin interface, which brings challenges to the thermal management of the EEDs/skin system. The sharp temperature increment caused by ungratified heat dissipation will lead to thermal comfort issues, such as damage to biological tissues and also device failure, which will limit the application and promotion of EEDs to a large extent. A growing quantity of interesting and fruitful literature are addressing this conundrum. In this review, we comb and review the research of EEDs active thermal management, which mainly summarizes the strategies of heat flow regulation, phase change energy storage, and heating mode design. This review aims to provide the overall advances and reference source for future innovative research directions.