Nylon as a building block for transparent electronic devices?

Nylon as a building block for transparent electronic devices?

As the microelectronics industry is now moving towards wearable electronic gadgets and electronic (E) textiles, in which electronic materials, such as ferroelectrics, must be integrated with our clothing. 

Nylon, a family of synthetic polymers, was first introduced to women's stockings in the 1940s and is among the most widely used synthetic fibers in textiles today. 

They consist of a long chain of repeated molecular units, namely polymers, where each repeating unit has a specific arrangement of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen with carbon atoms.

In addition to use in textiles, it was discovered that some nylons also exhibit so-called "ferroelectric properties". This means that positive and negative electric charges can be separated and this state can be maintained. 

Ferroelectric materials are used in sensors, actuators, memory, and energy harvesting devices. The advantage in using polymers is that they can be liquefied using sufficient solvents and are therefore processed at low cost to form thin films that are suitable for electronic devices such as capacitors, transistors, and diodes. 

This makes ferroelectric polymers a viable alternative for integration with e-textile. Although nylon polymers have found significant commercial applications over the years in fabrics and fibers, their application in electronic devices was hindered because it was impossible to make high-quality thin films of ferroelectric nylons by solution processing.

Scientists at MPI-P, together with researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and Lodz University of Technology, have now solved this forty-year-old problem, and have developed a method of ferroelectric nylon thin-film forming by dissolving nylon. 

A mixture of trifluoroacetic acid and acetone and freeze it again in a vacuum. They were able to realize thin nylon films that are typically only 100 nanometers thick, many times thinner than a human hair. 

Using this method, we have created extremely smooth thin films. This is very important because it prevents the electrical break down of the example capacitor and destroying the electronic circuit. At the same time, the smoothness of the transparent thin-films and Eventually allows. Transparent electronic devices, "group leader in MPI-P, Dr. Kamal Asadi says.

Using its newly developed method, the group around the Lotus Asiatic was able to produce high-performance nylon capacitors. Scientists subjected the prototype of the capacitor to extended stress cycles and demonstrated the robustness of ferroelectric nylon under millions of operation cycles.

 Thin nylon films may become an important component for use in flexible electronics in the future and may find applications for electronic components in clothes or in electronics. These new findings lead to multifunctional clothing acting as a fabric to cover our bodies as well as to generate electricity from the hustle of our body.