Application of partially zwitterionic poly(ionic liquid)s in humidity sensors

Yunlong Yu; Wei Zhang; Yaping Song; Yanyu Cui; Sen Liu; Teng Fei; Tong Zhang

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2025.01.030

Application of partially zwitterionic poly(ionic liquid)s in humidity sensors

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2025 Jan 6;684(Pt 1):192-200. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2025.01.030. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Yunlong Yu¹, Wei Zhang¹, Yaping Song¹, Yanyu Cui¹, Sen Liu¹, Teng Fei², Tong Zhang³

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun 130012 PR China.
² State Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun 130012 PR China. Electronic address: feiteng@jlu.edu.cn.
³ State Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun 130012 PR China. Electronic address: zhangtong@jlu.edu.cn.

PMID: 39793427
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2025.01.030

Abstract

Polyelectrolytes have shown promise as sensitive material for high-performance humidity sensors in recent years. How to obtain fast recovery and high sensitivity polyelectrolyte humidity sensors is a great challenge. A kind of poly(ionic liquid)s (PILs) humidity sensors modified by zwitterionic polymers (partially zwitterionic PILs, named PZPILs) were prepared in this work. The PZPILs can transform between PILs and zwitterionic polymers in different humidity sensitive processes. In the adsorption process of water molecules, characteristics of PZPILs are similar to those of PILs. When desorbing water molecules, the characteristics of PZPILs trend to those of sulfobetaine (SB) type zwitterionic polymers. This design endowed the humidity sensors high response and fast response/recovery characteristics. The optimized PZPILs sensor shows high response (4862.8) in a wide relative humidity (RH) range of 11 %-95 %, with short response/recovery time (1.0 s/15.0 s) and small humidity hysteresis about 0.6 % RH. The PZPILs shortened the recovery time of the PILs humidity sensors (from 143.4 s to 15.0 s), and improved the response (from 1980.8 to 4862.8).

Keywords: Fast recovery; Humidity sensor; Poly(ionic liquid)s; Zwitterionic polymers.