Not your mother’s tape: how flexible electronics utilize adhesive technology

From holiday gift wrapping to covering a cut with a bandage, adhesive tape is a fixture in modern life. Yet the sticky substance’s usefulness also extends to flexible electronic devices such as wearable sensors, drug delivery patches, and portable energy generators. He et al. uncovers the importance of adhesive tape and its various properties in flexible electronics.

Pressure-sensitive tape is comprised of a tacky adhesive and a supporting matrix that requires only slight pressure and a brief application time. Subtypes range from the familiar packing tape to conductive tape and tattoos, all with different properties and functionality.

Like in everyday use, a significant application of tape is simply sealing flexible electronics in their packaging. Less conventional uses include transferring a donor substrate, facilitating low-resistance electrical contact, or selectively removing access material. The authors summarize how the properties of tape impact the development of these technologies.

Peeling tape is also a complex process that can involve physical or chemical reactions and can even induce an electric field and release electromagnetic radiation. The authors recommend further study into the applications of this triboelectrification effect and identify the importance of improvements in biocompatibility to make implantable electronics such as organ patches or brain-machine interfaces possible.

“Peeling off adhesive tapes seems a simple operation in daily life,” said author Xuecheng He. “However, it is actually a complex process at the microscale level involving polymer chain rearrangement, orientation, and slippage.”

Recent advancements integrating the multifunctionality of tape open a range of new applications for flexible electronics.

“Adhesive tape-based therapeutic electronics simultaneously configured with sensors, actuators, and algorithms modules will improve our understanding of the relationship between disease and abnormal physiological signals,” said He.

Source: “Adhesive tapes: From daily necessities to flexible smart electronics,” by Xuecheng He, Wenyu Wang, Shijie Yang, Feilong Zhang, Zhen Gu, Bing Dai, Tailin Xu, Yan Yan Shery Huang, and Xueji Zhang, Applied Physics Reviews (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0107318 .

This paper is part of the Flexible and Smart Electronics Collection, learn more here .