How can soft polymer systems create devices that process information and interact with the world around them? That is the topic of a new review paper led by Max Tepermeister and with contribution from many members of the Silberstein lab and in collaboration with the Suntivich and Tian groups and published in Frontiers in Physics. Ionic polymers promise to underpin a new class of electronics that are soft, flexible and take advantage of the wide range of possible polymer functionalization. In this review, we present the underlying physical principles that govern the behavior of soft ionic materials
and devices, then we explore how soft ionic materials combine charged mobile species and tailored polymer structures to enable a wide array of functional devices, including flexible conductors, chemically specific sensors, bio-compatible interfaces, and deformable digital or analog signal processors. We identify the five key capabilities of ionic devices, and detail the cutting edge of each capability, bringing together findings from a range of research fields. Check out the supplementary animations we created for each device on our Youtube channel.

“Examining the impact of asymmetry in lattice-based mechanical metamaterials” is now published in Mechanics of Materials. This work was led by graduate student Srikar Srivatsa and was in collaboration with the Selva group at Texas A&M. In this study we use a generative algorithm to produce lattice-based metamaterials within a confined design space. We then mine that design space to find the broader set of mechanical properties enabled by fully asymmetric designs and to understand the physical mechanisms behind underlying these properties.