A Practical Approach to the Development of Inkjet Printable Functional Ionogels—Bendable, Foldable, Transparent, and Conductive Electrode Materials

Ionic liquid gels, or ionogels, are semi-conductive, flexible materials, offering a host of tunable physical properties, gaining an increasing level of scientific interest. One of the challenges of this emerging category of materials is that the structure-process-property relationships are still empirically driven. In this study, a simple, practical approach is laid out to prepare standardized libraries of these materials, for the purpose of selecting transparent, flexible conductive formulations that can be dispensed using inkjet printing. The net result of this was the optimization of a PEG-DMA ionogel formulation exhibiting an optical transparency that was greater than 94% from near-UV to near-IR from a 150 µm thick films, and a resistivity of 12.4 Ω · m.