Ionogels are promising material candidates for ionotronics due to their excellent ionic conductivity, stretchability, and thermal stability. However, it is challenging to develop 3D printable ionogels with both excellent electrical and mechanical properties. Here, we report a highly conductive and stretchable nanostructured (CSN) ionogel for 3D printing ionotronic sensors. We propose the photopolymerization-induced microphase separation strategy to prepare the CSN ionogels comprising continuous conducting nanochannels intertwined with cross-linked polymeric framework. The resultant CSN ionogels simultaneously achieves high ionic conductivity (over 3 S m⁻¹), high stretchability (over 1500%), low degree of hysteresis (0.4% at 50% strain), wide-temperature-range thermostability (−72 to 250 °C). Moreover, its high compatible with DLP 3D printing enables the fabrication of complex ionogel micro-architectures with high resolution (up to 5 μm), which allows us to manufacture capacitive sensors with superior sensing performances. The proposed CSN ionogel paves an efficient way to manufacture the next-generation capacitive sensors with enhanced performance.

Hybrid structure of graphene sheets supported by carbon nanotubes (CNTs) sustains unique properties of both graphene and CNTs, which enables the utilization of advantages of the two novel materials. In this work, the capability of three-dimensional pillared graphene structure used as nanomechanical sensors is investigated by performing molecular dynamics simulations. The obtained results demonstrate that: (a) the mass sensitivity of the pillared graphene structure is ultrahigh and can reach at least 1 yg (10⁻²⁴ g) with a mass responsivity 0.34 GHz · yg⁻¹; (b) the sizes of pillared graphene structure, particularly the distance between carbon nanotube pillars, have a significant effect on the sensing performance; (c) an analytical expression can be derived to detect the deposited mass from the resonant frequency of the pillared graphene structure. The performed analyses might be significant to future design and application of pillared graphene based sensors with high sensitivity and large detecting area.

The recently synthesized ultrathin diamond nanothreads (NTHs) exhibit a variety of intriguing properties and are probably the most successful of many encouraging applications to be designed as resonators due to their ultrahigh sensitivity and low dissipation. Herein, we report via molecular dynamics that diamond nanothreads possess not only ultrahigh mass sensitivity but also a very high quality factor. On the one hand, the studied diamond nanothreads demonstrate an extreme mass resolution of ∼0.58 yg (1 yg = 10^–24 g), which is almost one order of magnitude higher than that of carbon nanotubes (∼10 yg) with the same length. Moreover, the sensing performance of NTHs is highly tunable owing to their tailorable structures. On the other hand, NTHs exhibit a very low intrinsic energy dissipation and thus a high quality factor which is generally two times that of carbon nanotubes. These intriguing features suggest that diamond nanothreads could be highly attractive candidates for fabricating nano-sized mechanical resonators with outstanding performance.