Magnetic Liquid Metal (Fe-EGaIn) Based Multifunctional Electronics for Remote Self-Healing Materials, Degradable Electronics, and Thermal Transfer Printing

Flexible materials with the ability to be bent, strained, or twisted play a critical role in soft robots and stretchable electronics. Although tremendous efforts are focused on developing new stretchable materials with excellent stability, inevitable mechanical damage due to long term deformation is still an urgent problem to be tackled. Here, a magnetic healing method based on Fe-doped liquid metal (Fe-GaIn) conductive ink via a noncontact way is proposed. Further, multifunctional flexible electronics are designed with combined performances of superior remote self-healing under magnetic field, water-degradable, and thermal transfer printing, which attribute to three parts of the materials including Fe-GaIn conductive ink, degradable PVA substrate, and adhesive fructose. The as-made light emitting diodes (LED) circuit is demonstrated with both structural and functional repairing after single or multipoint damage. The self-healing time from multipoint damage is pretty fast within 10 s. Due to the water-soluble PVA film, the recycling process is simple via immersing into water. Through heating, the electric circuit on fructose can be transferred to other flexible substrate with high efficiency, which broadens the practical applications of the present system. The novel and multifunctional electronics hold great promise for self-healing electronics, transient electronics, and soft robots.