Scientists at the University of Stockholm in Sweden have researched the potential of commodity polymers in increasing the sustainability of medical electronic sensors.
Medical electronic sensors are devices placed on our body to measure minute changes, such as blood sugar levels in diabetic patients. These electronic sensors are made of organic semiconductors which are both expensive and have a significant carbon footprint, including silicon, cobalt, germanium, indium, and platinum.
Silicon, for example, requires high amounts of energy to be extracted and China’s Xinjiang region, where human rights abuses to Uyghurs minorities have been recorded, is one of the world’s largest producers of the raw material.
The researchers showed that the footprint of medical electronic sensors can be reduced by decreasing the amount of raw material used in production and replacing it with polymers.
“Organic semiconductors have the potential to decrease our dependency on critical raw materials, particularly in applications that are not meant to last for a lifetime, like disposable and consumers electronics,” Erica Zeglio, Assistant professor at the University of Stockholm said in a statement. "However, high performance organic semiconductors are currently manufactured at a small scale and using complex chemistries. Commodity polymers like polystyrene are synthesised at large scale and at a fraction of the cost."
The scientists showed that blending so-called n-type organic semiconductors with insulating polymers ‘drastically improve the performance of organic electrochemical transistors while decreasing considerably the amount of conjugated polymer needed’ by six times. PS showed the best results, leading to enhanced performance by two orders of magnitude and a 12% increase in device stability.
“Blends that decrease the amount of semiconductor and increase performance are a win-win situation,” said Anna Herland, co-corresponding author of the study. “We can use less amounts of the costly material component while at the same time provide better performance and stability – a critical parameter for applications, such as sensors, where reliable monitoring is of outmost importance,” she concluded.
The researchers shared their findings in ‘Mixing Insulating Commodity Polymers with Semiconducting n-type Polymers Enables High-Performance Electrochemical Transistors’, recently published in Advanced Materials.