SMART MATERIALS FOR STRETCHABLE ELECTRONICS, SENSORS AND SOFT ACTUATION

Smart materials can be exploited to facilitate disruptive or transformative changes in several fields like stretchable electronics, soft robotics or to develop new class of sensors. They are innovative materials that interact with the environment and respond to external stimuli altering their physical properties in a controlled fashion. They are made integrating different materials at the nanoscale in a nanocomposite to obtain novel functionalities that are not showed from individual constituents. Polymers are the best candidates to be used in smart material fabrication because of their structural and functional properties that can be easily tuned. Moreover, they are low-cost, versatile and can be processed into any shape including thin films. In order to exploit smart materials for soft robotics or stretchable electronic applications, it is required that they should be electrically conductive, patternable, have good mechanical properties and need to be able to transduce an electrical signal in a mechanical response. In addition, their functionalities should remain unchanged over a long period of time. Thus polymers are combined with hard materials like metals, semiconductors or standard electronic components. It is challenging to fabricate technologically relevant smart materials combining hard and soft materials because of their intrinsic physical diversities. Standard manufacturing processes fail to achieve the needed requirements. Among different processes to fabricate smart materials based on polymers, Supersonic Cluster Beam Implantation (SCBI) and Supersonic Cluster Beam Deposition (SCBD) are effective techniques to realize smart materials based on metal/polymer nanocomposites. In my thesis work, I have demonstrated that it is possible to produce new robust smart materials, designing both their electrical and mechanical properties with sharp precision. Metal/polymer nanocomposites have been designed at the nanoscale level to obtain sensors, actuators and electronic devices. Their electrical and mechanical properties have been characterized and their performances have been tested under different stress conditions.