Surface energy-directed assembly of liquid metal particles for intelligent wearable electronics

Summary: Liquid metals (LMs) are promising for flexible electronics owing to their high electrical conductivity and inherent room temperature deformability. However, their high surface tension poses major technical barriers for high-resolution patterning. While conventional pre-patterned metal seeding layers can enable deterministic LM patterning, this approach inevitably adds redundant fabrication steps and increases process complexity. Here, we develop a seeding-layer-free surface energy-directed assembly process based on ultrasonically dispersed, sodium alginate-stabilized LM particle dispersions, which enables high-precision LM patterning on various stretchable substrates. The fabricated strain sensors exhibit 1,000-cycle stability, while the LM electrode arrays paired with a convolutional neural network achieve 94% accuracy in gesture recognition. This work establishes a high-precision, environmentally benign, and broadly applicable platform for next-generation LM-based flexible and stretchable electronics.