NANOMATERIALS
Highly stretchable van der Waals thin films for
adaptable and breathable electronic membranes
Zhuocheng Yan^1 , Dong Xu^2 , Zhaoyang Lin^1 , Peiqi Wang^1 , Bocheng Cao^1 , Huaying Ren^1 , Frank Song^1 ,
Chengzhang Wan^1 , Laiyuan Wang^2 , Jingxuan Zhou^2 , Xun Zhao^3 , Jun Chen^3 ,
Yu Huang2,4, Xiangfeng Duan1,4
The conformal integration of electronic systems with irregular, soft objects is essential for many
emerging technologies. We report the design of van der Waals thin films consisting of staggered
two-dimensional nanosheets with bond-free van der Waals interfaces. The films feature sliding and
rotation degrees of freedom among the staggered nanosheets to ensure mechanical stretchability and
malleability, as well as a percolating network of nanochannels to endow permeability and breathability.
With an excellent mechanical match to soft biological tissues, the freestanding films can naturally
adapt to local surface topographies and seamlessly merge with living organisms with highly conformal
interfaces, rendering living organisms with electronic functions, including leaf-gate and skin-gate
transistors. On-skin transistors allow high-fidelity monitoring and local amplification of skin potentials
and electrophysiological signals.
T
he integration of electronic systems with
irregular, soft objects is of increasing
importance for many emerging tech-
nologies, including electronics for the
Internet of Things and bioelectronics for
monitoring dynamic living organisms and for
diagnosing and treating human diseases in
the context of personalized medicine and
telehealth ( 1 ). A robust bioelectronic system
requires intimate interaction with biological
structures to perform specific operations, such
as biological signal recording ( 2 – 4 ), amplifi-
cation ( 5 – 7 ), and extraction ( 8 ), as well as
delivering electrical ( 9 , 10 ) or chemical stim-
ulation ( 11 ). Thus, the implementation of bio-
electronics hinges on a number of unusual
material and device characteristics, including
electronic performance; mechanical flexibility,
stretchability, or malleability to ensure confor-
mal and adaptable interfaces with dynamically
evolving microscopic surface topographies; and
permeability or breathability for gas and/or
nutrient exchange between living organisms
and their surroundings to lessen perturbation
of natural biofunctions.
Conventional hard electronic materials ex-
hibit an intrinsic mismatch with soft biologi-
cal tissues in terms of electrical conductivity,
mechanical response, permeability, and envi-
ronmental adaptability. Hard inorganic semi-
conductorscanbemadeflexibleinanultrathin
membrane format but are barely stretchable
and cannot form a conformal interface with
irregular geometries with nonzero Gaussian
curvatures owing to their fundamental topo-
logical limitations ( 12 ). The development of
specifically designed deformation-tolerant
structures, such as wrinkled ( 13 ), buckled ( 14 ),
waved ( 15 ), or serpentine structures ( 16 – 18 ),
bring macroscopic stretchability but not
microscopic conformability, because of the
intrinsic microscopic structural undulation.
Organic or composite semiconductor thin
films can be made stretchable or conformal
( 19 ) but usually exhibit insufficient electronic
performance ( 12 , 20 ) or limited stability in a
typical wet biological environment.
Additionally, traditional inorganic membranes
or organic thin films typically exhibit limited
mechanical robustness in the ultrathin free-
standing format and require a polymer [e.g.,
polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and polyimide
(PI)] substrate support to retain structural in-
tegrity ( 12 ) and specific porous architecture de-
sign to achieve breathability ( 21 ). The polymer
substrate is typically much thicker (≫ 1 mm)
than a cell membrane (~10 nm), with a large
bending stiffness ( 22 ) and poor conformability
and adaptability to the dynamically evolv-
ing biological structures ( 23 ).
Inspired by van der Waals (VDW) interac-
tions in biological assemblies, we exploited these
interactions to assemble two-dimensional (2D)
nanosheets ( 24 – 27 ) into freestanding VDW
thin films (VDWTFs) with an excellent me-
chanical match to soft biological tissues that
can directly adapt to and merge with living
organisms with ultraconformal and breathable
membrane–tissue interfaces. The VDWTFs
feature bond-free VDW interfaces between the
staggered 2D nanosheets, opening sliding
and rotation degrees of freedom between
neighboring nanosheets to endow unusual
mechanical flexibility, stretchability, and mal-
leability. The staggered VDWTFs also featurea percolating network of nanochannels for
permeability or breathability.Topological and mechanical limitations of a
conformal interface
Although the flexibility of intrinsically stiff
materials (e.g., a silicon wafer or hard card-
board) can be increased in the ultrathin mem-
brane format (e.g., a silicon membrane or
paper) ( 28 ), stretchability is fundamentally
limited by the covalent chemical bonds and
barely changes with reduced thickness ( 29 ).
Owing to intrinsic topological limitations,
it is impossible to use such flexible yet un-
stretchable membranes to make a confor-
mal interface with local topographies with
nonzero Gaussian curvatures (e.g., wrap-
ping a piece of paper around a pen; Fig. 1A)
( 30 ). To achieve a conformal interface with
irregular geometries, stretchability is es-
sential to allow necessary deformation to
adapt to the local surface topographies. Spe-
cific polymeric materials with intermolecu-
lar slippages between polymer chains can
be made stretchable ( 31 , 32 ) and adaptable
to local topographies under sufficient tensile
stress (e.g., wrapping parafilm around a pen;
Fig. 1B) ( 29 ).
To achieve a conformal interface with a
stretchable membrane, external pressure is
needed to induce sufficient deformation to
match the local surface topography, which
results in a contact pressure that can cause
tissue deformation or damage (e.g., tightly
wrapping parafilm around a fingertip). A 3D
geometric model is constructed to visualize
the conformal adapting process of a stretch-
able membrane on spherical topographies
and to explore the evolution of the local de-
formation with the contact pressure (Fig. 1C).
With increasing load, the membrane grad-
ually adapts to the spherical indentations,
with the membrane grid stretched and ex-
panded to accommodate the local strain and
deformation during the conformal adapting
process.
We use a simplified spherical indentation
model to evaluate the maximum contact pres-
sure needed for forming a conformal interface
with a surface topography of a given curva-
ture. The indentation strain,e,isgivenbye¼krcontact
rcurveð 1 Þwherercontactandrcurveare the contact radius
and the topography radius, respectively (Fig.
1D), andkis a constant associated with inden-
tation strain ( 33 ). Overall, the contact radius
and indentation strain increase with increas-
ing load until a conformal interface between
the membrane and the hemisphere is achieved.
The maximum contact pressure needed for
achieving a conformal interface is determined852 25 FEBRUARY 2022•VOL 375 ISSUE 6583 science.orgSCIENCE
(^1) Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of
California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.^2 Department of
Materials Science and Engineering, University of California,
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.^3 Department of
Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
90095, USA.^4 California NanoSystems Institute, University of
California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (X.D.);
[email protected] (Y.H.)
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