Deformation-Induced Multioptical Morphology Elastomer Constructed from Phosphorescent Nanospheres for Underwater Mechanical Sensing

Combination of multioptical morphology, such as transmission, scattering, fluorescence (FL), and room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP), to build multisignal-integrated devices is highly attractive in future optical devices but extremely difficult owing to the poorly matched material design and construction principles. Here, we report a novel multioptical morphology elastomer (MOME) fabricated by encapsulating monodisperse RTP SiO2 nanoparticles (RTP-SiO2 NPs) with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The switching behavior of optical signals is dependent on the deformation of MOME, such as stretching, bending, and squeezing. The MOME changes from a transparent state to a white scattered state under white light as the deformation increases, while the FL and RTP are significantly enhanced from the original weak state. During deformation, the air voids generated by the separation of RTP-SiO2 NPs and PDMS at the interface result in a refractive index mismatch, leading to a significant enhancement of light scattering and further causing deformation-induced self-scattering enhancement behavior in FL and RTP. Moreover, MOME also has intriguing modulation phenomena, such as dynamic deformation-regulated RTP during the decay process and solvent-deformation synergistically regulated optical switching behavior. On account of the outstanding optical properties, MOME is applied in daily visual monitoring of underwater pipelines, including displacement deviation, leakage, swelling, and localized anomalous protrusions. These findings provide important breakthroughs for the design of multioptical morphology integrated devices, demonstrating great potential for applications.