A breathable, designable and flexible leather–heater used in wearable thermotherapy

作     者：ZHU JingYu LIU YaDong XIE RuiJie ZHAO YuHan WANG Feng LIU YunQing ZHA BaoLi WU JianSheng HUO FengWei 

作者机构：Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronics(KLOFE)School of Flexible Electronics(Future Technologies)Institute of Advanced Materials(IAM)Nanjing Tech UniversityNanjing 211816China The Institute of Flexible Electronics(IFEFuture Technologies)Xiamen UniversityXiamen 361005China Tan Kah Kee Innovation LaboratoryXiamen 361102China 

出 版 物：《Science China(Technological Sciences)》 (中国科学（技术科学英文版）)

年 卷 期：2024年第67卷第7期

页      面：2125-2132页

核心收录：

学科分类：0831[工学-生物医学工程（可授工学、理学、医学学位）] 08[工学] 0836[工学-生物工程] 

基　　金：supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2021YFB3200302) the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 22075139, 62101545, 51702155, and 62288102) the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 20720230041) 

主　　题：flexible electronics leather thermotherapy 

摘      要：Flexible heaters with personal thermal management capabilities have great potential in thermal therapy applications due to their excellent flexibility, low power consumption, and portability. However, manufacturing wearable heating devices that are breathable, wear resistant and conformal for long-term use is still challenging. To address these issues, we designed a leather heater using breathable, biocompatible, and tailorable leather as the substrate through a simple in-situ polymerization polypyrrole strategy. This heater exhibits excellent heating and mechanical properties(reaching 64℃ at a voltage of 5 V with efficient Joule heat generation of 2286 W/m^(2)and uniform temperature distribution, and functioning properly after 1000 cycles of bendability tests). In addition, this heater displays better wear resistance and water vapor permeability rate(38.04 g/(m^(2)h)). The cuttable and sewable of leather gives the strategy ability to be flexibly designed to mold the heater to the specific requirements of different body parts, providing a new approach to wearable thermal therapy.