Highly Fatigue-Resistant Stretchable Electrodes Based on Regular Stripe-Shaped Platinum Nanofilm

Abstract

Stretchable electronics face the challenge of long-term stable operation, and one of the difficulties is that the core component electrodes maintain a high conductivity under multiple stretchable deformations. To address this issue, we propose a highly fatigue-resistant stretchable metal film electrode, which consists of a platinum nanofilm prebent into regular microconvex stripes on the surface of an elastomeric material. The electrical conductivity of the stretchable electrode is 4.1 × 10⁵ S/m and maintains stability after 10,000 stretch–release cycles at 40% strain. Compared with the conventional metal film electrode with a randomly wavy shape, the microconvex stripe-shaped platinum nanofilm significantly suppresses the strain concentration and the crack propagation of the nanofilm during the stretch–release cycles, resulting in the resistance after 1000 cycles being half that of conventional electrodes. The pressure sensor, based on the proposed electrode, has been shown to possess excellent fatigue resistance with only a 4% change in sensitivity after fatigue. The stretchable electrode based on a microconvex stripe-shaped platinum nanofilm on the elastomer provides an innovative solution for the long-term stable operation of stretchable electronics.