Laying wires in fractal patterns could improve stretchable electronics.
Devices such as wearable sensors require circuits that can withstand stretching. A team led by John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign bonded wires in fractal motifs to elastic materials (pictured). Fractals are complex patterns that, when divided into smaller parts, look the same as they do when whole. The authors showed that their devices were more stretchable than those that had repeating loop and S-shaped patterns, with certain fractal designs allowing for stretching in specific directions.
The authors say that such structures could be used in sensors worn on the skin or radio antennas that can be mechanically tuned.
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Patterns make circuits stretchy. Nature 506, 411 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/506411e
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/506411e
