Liquid Metal Composite Organohydrogel Based on Water-Soluble Starch Stabilizer with Supertoughness, Self-Healing, and Harsh-Environmental Tolerance for an Advanced Strain Sensor

In this work, a supertough, self-healable, and extreme-environment-tolerable liquid metal (LM) composite organohydrogel was fabricated by dispersing LM particles (LMPs) with water-soluble starch (WS) and leveraging multilevel hydrogen-bonding interactions. Attributed to the cooperation of the strong dual-hydrogen bonds and weak monohydrogen bonds, the organohydrogel obtained an outstanding tensile strength of 2.0 +/- 0.13 MPa and toughness of 16.0 +/- 1.0 MJ m-3, as well as desirable self-healing ability. The organohydrogel strain sensor has a high gauge factor (GF) of 15.08 along with a large detection range (0-1159%), demonstrating its outstanding sensitivity. It was successfully applied for manipulator gesture detection in harsh environments, showing excellent detection resolution and sensing stability in a wide temperature range (-20 to 50 degrees C). This work provides a new avenue for preparing multifunctional LM composite gels, showing great promise for next-generation wearable electronics.