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The rise of paper electronics has been accelerated due to the public push for sustainability. Electronic waste can potentially be avoided if certain materials in electronic components can be substituted for greener alternatives such as paper. Within this report, it is demonstrated that conductive polymers poly(3,4‐ethylenedoxythiophene) (PEDOT), polypyrrole, and polythiophene, can be synthesized by screen printing combined with vapor phase polymerization on paper substrates and further incorporated into functional electronic components. High patterning resolution (100 µm) is achieved for all conductive polymers, with PEDOT showing impressive sheet resistance values. PEDOT is incorporated as conductive circuitry and as the active material in all‐printed electrochromic displays. The conductive polymer circuits allow for functional light emitting diodes, while the electrochromic displays are comparable to commercial displays utilizing PEDOT on plastic substrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for achieving sustainable technologies has encouraged research on renewable and biodegradable materials for novel products that are clean, green, and environmentally friendly. Nanocellulose (NC) has many attractive properties such as high mechanical strength and flexibility, large specific surface area, in addition to possessing good wet stability and resistance to tough chemical environments. NC has also been shown to easily integrate with other materials to form composites. By combining it with conductive and electroactive materials, many of the advantageous properties of NC can be transferred to the resulting composites. Conductive polymers, in particular poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene:poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), have been successfully combined with cellulose derivatives where suspensions of NC particles and colloids of PEDOT:PSS are made to interact at a molecular level. Alternatively, different polymerization techniques have been used to coat the cellulose fibrils. When processed in liquid form, the resulting mixture can be used as a conductive ink. This review outlines the preparation of NC/PEDOT:PSS composites and their fabrication in the form of electronic nanopapers, filaments, and conductive aerogels. We also discuss the molecular interaction between NC and PEDOT:PSS and the factors that affect the bonding properties. Finally, we address their potential applications in energy storage and harvesting, sensors, actuators, and bioelectronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of the society is characterized by an increasing flow of information from things to the internet. Sensors have become the cornerstone of the internet-of-everything as they track various parameters in the society and send them to the cloud for analysis, forecast, or learning. With the many parameters to sense, sensors are becoming complex and difficult to manufacture. To reduce the complexity of manufacturing, one can instead create advanced functional materials that react to multiple stimuli. To this end, conducting polymer aerogels are promising materials as they combine elasticity and sensitivity to pressure and temperature. However, the challenge is to read independently pressure and temperature output signals without cross-talk. Here, a strategy to fully decouple temperature and pressure reading in a dual-parameter sensor based on thermoelectric polymer aerogels is demonstrated. It is found that aerogels made of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) can display properties of semiconductors lying at the transition between insulator and semimetal upon exposure to high boiling point polar solvents, such as dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). Importantly, because of the temperature-independent charge transport observed for DMSO-treated PEDOT-based aerogel, a decoupled pressure and temperature sensing can be achieved without cross-talk in the dual-parameter sensor devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we report macroscopic electromagnetic devices made from conducting polymers. We compare their fundamental properties and device parameters with those of similar devices made from copper wires. By using self-standing supra-ampere conducting polymer wires, we are able to manufacture inductors that generate magnetic fields well over 1 G, and incorporate them in feedback LC oscillators operating at 8.65 MHz. Moreover, by utilizing the unique electrochemical functionality of conducting polymers, we demonstrate electrochemically-tunable electromagnets and electromagnetic chemical sensors. Our findings pave the way to lightweight electromagnetic technologies that can be processed (from water dispersions) using low-temperature protocols into flexible shapes and geometries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]