Novel synthetic strategy enhances ionic conductivity and mechanical strength in polyampholyte elastomers, indicating potential applications in sensors.
The development of ionic materials with high ionic conductivity and mechanical strength is challenging. This study presents a novel synthetic strategy for the development of a mechanically robust and ionically conductive polyampholyte elastomer based on ionic dimers (IDs) with strong ionic bonds between imidazolium and sulfonate. Polymerization of ID monomers with a network that forms a cross‐linking moiety results in a novel polyampholyte ID elastomer (IDE). The addition of lithium (Li) salts in the IDE substantially enhances the ionic conductivity up to 0.82 mS cm −1 with a high Li + transference number ( t Li⁺ ) of 0.79. The mechanical properties of the IDE with Li salts are remarkable, with a tensile strength of 27.4 MPa and a Young's modulus of 211 MPa, outperforming previous polyampholyte elastomers. A resistive‐type iontronic sensor using the IDE exhibited excellent sensitivity (gauge factor = 2.92) and reliable cycle performance (≈400 cycles) under repetitive stress. The IDE serves as a polymer electrolyte in a pouch‐type full cell, showing stable capacity at a high current density of 1.0 C (corresponding to 4.0 mA cm −2 ) under ambient conditions (25 °C, 0.2 MPa). This synthetic strategy offers a new approach for designing ionic materials with high conductivity and mechanical strength.
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Kim et al. (2025) studied this question.
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