Soup Additive to Create a Stretchable Plastic Electrode

Paving the way for flexible electronics, Stanford chemical engineers have developed a plastic electrode that stretches like rubber but carries electricity like wires.

The brain is soft and electronics are stiff, which can make combining the two challenging, such as when neuroscientists implant electrodes to measure brain activity and perhaps deliver tiny jolts of electricity for pain relief or other purposes.

Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao is trying to change that. For more than a decade, her lab has been working to make electronics soft and flexible so that they feel and operate almost like a second skin. Along the way, the team has started to focus on making brittle plastics that can conduct electricity more elastic.

Now in Science Advances, Bao’s team describes how they took one such brittle plastic and modified it chemically to make it as bendable as a rubber band, while slightly enhancing its electrical conductivity. The result is a soft, flexible electrode that is compatible with our supple and sensitive nerves.

“This flexible electrode opens up many new, exciting possibilities down the road for brain interfaces and other implantable electronics,” said Bao, a professor of chemical engineering. “Here, we have a new material with uncompromised electrical performance and high stretchability.”

The material is still a laboratory prototype, but the team hopes to develop it as part of their long-term focus on creating flexible materials that interface with the human body.

Flexible interface

Electrodes are fundamental to electronics. Conducting electricity, these wires carry back and forth signals that allow different components in a device to work together. In our brains, special thread-like fibres called axons play a similar role, transmitting electric impulses between neurons. Bao’s stretchable plastic is designed to make a more seamless connection between the stiff world of electronics and the flexible organic electrodes in our bodies.

“One thing about the human brain that a lot of people don’t know is that it changes volume throughout the day,” said postdoctoral research fellow Yue Wang, the first author on the paper. “It swells and deswells.” The current generation of electronic implants can’t stretch and contract with the brain and make it complicated to maintain a good connection.

To create a flexible electrode, the researchers began with a plastic that had two essential qualities: high conductivity and biocompatibility, meaning that it could be safely brought into contact with the human body. But this plastic had a shortcoming: It was very brittle. Stretching it even 5 percent would break it.

“By understanding the interaction at the molecular level, we can develop electronics that are soft and stretchy like skin, while remaining conductive,” Wang said.

Other authors include postdoctoral fellows Chenxin Zhu, Francisco Molina-Lopez, Franziska Lissel and Jia Liu; graduate students Shucheng Chen and Noelle I. Rabiah; Hongping Yan and Michael F. Toney, staff scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Christian Linder, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute; Boris Murmann, a professor of electrical engineering and a member of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute; Lihua Jin, now an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles; Zheng Chen, now an assistant professor of nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego; and colleagues from the Materials Science Institute of Barcelona, Spain, and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

This work was funded by Samsung Electronics and the Air Force Office of Science Research.