Sustainable Poly Thioctic Acid-Based Elastomer for Super-Stretchable Electronic Sensors

Stretchable sensors have attracted an increasing interests in electronic skin, motion monitoring, medical care, and human-computer interaction. The traditional polymer-based elastomers possess excellent mechanical properties, however, are non-recyclable and difficult-to-degrade. Poly(thioctic acid) (PTA) offers recyclability through reversible disulfide bond polymerization, its poor resilience and conductivity limit practical applications. Herein, the synthesis of a recyclable polysulfide network has been pioneered with super-stretchability, remarkable resilience, electrical stability, and self-healing ability through molecular structure design. By modifying the thioctic acid (TA) repeating units with cationic chains to obtain cationic thioctic acid (C 15 H 25 N 2 O 2 S 2 Br, TAB), and subsequently co-polymerizing it with PTA, the recyclable and super-stretchable Poly(TA- co -TAB) are generated with high resilience and electronic stability. The resulting material achieves tunable stretchability (360–1700%), high sensitivity (GF = 16.2), fast response/recovery (117/108 ms), and stability (>1500 cycles at 100% strain). Notably, the material can be fully recycled via a simple alkaline dissolution-acid extraction process, showcasing its environmental sustainability.