Solid-Liquid Composites for Soft Multifunctional Materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews solid-liquid composites, highlighting their unique properties, fabrication methods, and diverse applications in soft electronics, robotics, and biology, emphasizing their potential for multifunctional soft materials.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the morphology, fabrication, and functional properties of solid-liquid composites, emphasizing recent advances and broad applications.

Findings

Solid-liquid composites exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties.

Various fabrication techniques enable tailored composite morphologies.

Applications span soft electronics, robotics, and biological systems.

Abstract

Soft materials with a liquid component are an emerging paradigm in materials design. The incorporation of a liquid phase, such as water, liquid metals, or complex fluids, into solid materials imparts unique properties and characteristics that emerge as a result of the dramatically different properties of the liquid and solid. Especially in recent years, this has led to the development and study of a range of novel materials with new functional responses, with applications in topics including soft electronics, soft robotics, 3D printing, wet granular systems and even in cell biology. Here we provide a review of solid-liquid composites, broadly defined as a material system with at least one, phase-separated liquid component, and discuss their morphology and fabrication approaches, their emergent mechanical properties and functional response, and the broad range of their applications.