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Electronic fibres via the thermal drawing of liquid-metal-embedded elastomers

Nature Electronics volume 8, pages 1072–1081 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Soft electronic fibres are potential building blocks for a variety of emerging technologies including smart textiles and wearable health monitors. However, it remains a challenge to fabricate fibres that combine conductive and dielectric domains in complex architectures in a simple and scalable way. Here we show that a thermal drawing approach can be used to fabricate stretchable fibre-based sensors from liquid-metal-embedded elastomers. The material formulation and processing parameters can be controlled to create high aspect-ratio stretchable fibres that integrate high-conductivity (around 103 S cm−1) and high-dielectric (\(\kappa \approx 13.5\)) domains across the fibre cross-section. We illustrate the versatility of our approach by creating an all-liquid-metal-based capacitive fibre sensor, which offers a gauge factor of 0.96, stretchability of 925% and high stability to cyclic deformation. We also integrate our fibre-based sensor into textiles and demonstrate an efficient smart knee brace.

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Fig. 1: Material investigation and thermal drawing of LMEEs.
Fig. 2: Electrical activation optimization of the LM–SIS system.
Fig. 3: Highly conductive thermally drawn fibres with low electromechanical coupling.
Fig. 4: From conductor to dielectric, towards all-LMEE-fibre-based capacitive sensors.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to M. Mariello for help with the Linkam setup, and to C. Valotton and A. Taureg for their support in microstructural characterization. We acknowledge the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Grant 204579 ‘Highly integrated soft fibres for advanced sensing and actuation’, to F.S.) and InnoSuisse funding scheme (project number 44946.1, to F.S.) for funding this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Materials, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Stella Laperrousaz, Xin Chen, Marion Cleusix, Lucas Jourdan, Laurène Tribolet & Fabien Sorin

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  1. Stella Laperrousaz
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  2. Xin Chen
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  3. Marion Cleusix
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  4. Lucas Jourdan
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Contributions

S.L. and F.S. developed the idea. S.L. and L.T. contributed to the method development to characterize the LMEE electrical properties. S.L. and M.C. participated in the design and characterization of highly conductive LMEEs, whereas S.L. and L.J. worked on the dielectric LMEEs. S.L. and X.C. designed and tested the devices (stretchable interconnects and smart knee brace). S.L. carried out the data analysis. S.L. and F.S. wrote the manuscript and all authors helped with the revision.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabien Sorin.

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Nature Electronics thanks Xuemei Fu, Shaowu Pan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–25, Notes 1–3 and captions to Supplementary Videos 1 and 2.

Supplementary Video 1

LEDs powered by our stretchable fibre interconnects. No significant change in light intensity is noticeable while stretching the LMEE fibre, which acts as electrode.

Supplementary Video 2

After integrating the fibre-based capacitive stretch sensor on a knee brace, the knee bending angle was monitored while squatting, jumping, walking and running on a treadmill. This demonstrates the versatility and resilience of the proposed fibre-based sensor.

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Laperrousaz, S., Chen, X., Cleusix, M. et al. Electronic fibres via the thermal drawing of liquid-metal-embedded elastomers. Nat Electron 8, 1072–1081 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01485-0

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