Junhyuk Shin, a PhD student in POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering and the paper’s first author (advisor: Professor Su Seok Choi), received an Outstanding Paper Presentation Award at the Polymer Society of Korea 2024 meeting, a prestigious Korean polymer conference, for “Strategic Designs for Strain Control Using Mechanochromism.”

The study addressed the unavoidable nonuniform strain that occurs when conventional stretchable electronic devices are stretched. Using kirigami cuts and rigid plates, it achieved a uniform strain distribution.

A flexible, stretchable chiral liquid crystal elastomer enables optical sensing of strain through color changes. The researchers also fabricated a flexible optical device with a design that adjusts the spacing between rigid plates to reflect only the desired color wavelength.

The results are expected to suggest applications in optical and electronic devices through uniform strain control in stretchable devices.

The research was supported by the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation’s funding program and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology’s Display Innovation Process Program.