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Elastic and Stretchable Functional Fibers: A Review of Materials, Fabrication Methods, and Applications

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Abstract

Elastic and stretchable functional fibers have drawn attentions from wide research field because of their unique advantages including high dynamic bending elasticity, stretchability and high mechanic strength. Lots of efforts have been made to find promising soft materials and improve the processing methods to fabricate the elastomer fibers with controllable fiber geometries and designable functionalities. Significant progress has been made and various interdisciplinary applications have been demonstrated based on their unique mechanical performance. A series of remarkable applications, involving biomedicine, optics, electronics, human machine interfaces etc., have been successfully achieved. Here, we summarize main processing methods to fabricate soft and stretchable functional fibers using different types of elastic materials, which are either widely used or specifically developed. We also introduce some representative applications of multifunctional elastic fibers to reveal this promising research area. All these reported applications indicate that the fast innovated interdisciplinary area is of great potential and inspire more remarkable ideas in fiber sensing, soft electronics, functional fiber integration and other related research fields.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE2019-T2-2-127 and T2EP50120-0005), A*STAR under AME IRG (A2083c0062), the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (RG90/19 and RG73/19) and the Singapore National Research Foundation Competitive Research Program (NRF-CRP18-2017-02). This work was also supported by Nanyang Technological University.

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  1. Mengxiao Chen and Zhe Wang have contributed equally to the work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Mengxiao Chen, Zhe Wang & Lei Wei

  2. Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 511443, China

    Kaiwei Li

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Cardio-Cerebral Vascular Detection Technology and Medicinal Effectiveness Appraisal, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Xiandi Wang

  4. CINTRA CNRS/NTU/THALES, UMI3288, Research Techno Plaza, 50 Nanyang Drive, Singapore, 637553, Singapore

    Lei Wei

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  1. Mengxiao Chen
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Chen, M., Wang, Z., Li, K. et al. Elastic and Stretchable Functional Fibers: A Review of Materials, Fabrication Methods, and Applications. Adv. Fiber Mater. 3, 1–13 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42765-020-00057-5

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