Highly sensitive and environmentally stable conductive eutectogels for flexible wearable sensors based on sodium alginate/poly(vinyl alcohol)/MXene

In recent years, flexible sensors have attracted much attention due to their wide range of applications. Eutectogel solved the problems of water loss and phase separation of conventional hydrogels. In this work, a purely natural polymer, sodium alginate (SA), was used to construct the network structure of the gel with MXene, PVA and deep eutectic solvent (DES) were used to initiate the physical cross-linking, and an antimicrobial eutectogel was synthesised by one-pot method, which possessed excellent mechanical properties (fracture strain of about 1350 % and fracture toughness of about 2.50 MJ/m 3 ) and a high gauge factor (GF = 7.66). In addition, the resulting gels had good environmental stability (−20 °C–60 °C, maintained a highly repeatable response signal) and enabled wireless sensing. The sensor was capable of sensitively monitoring human joint movements and micro-expressions, which offered a wide range of application prospects for the development of wearable electronic products suitable for human movement.