Natural leather enabled skin-friendly, multifunctional and durable flexible display with integrated electroluminescent displaying and electromagnetic interference shielding performances

Next-generation displays demand flexibility with skin-friendliness, durability and multifunctionality for emerging applications. Herein, a skin-friendly, multifunctional and durable flexible display with integrated electroluminescent displaying and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding performances was developed by the engineering of natural leather using leather retanning and finishing derived treatment processes. Polypyrrole was in-situ grown on natural leather via retanning-like process to fabricate the conductive leather, followed by successive coating of the electroluminescent layer and the top electrode layer through finishing-like process, thus obtaining a novel multifunctional natural leather-based flexible display. The conductive leather served as flexible bottom electrode to work with other functional layers to endow the flexible display with high-luminance and patterned color-tunable electroluminescence, which also presented strong durability after 1000 bending cycles or water washing. The conductive leather with unique hierarchically fibrous structure also facilitated the flexible display to achieve high EMI shielding effectiveness. Moreover, the collagenous nature of natural leather guaranteed the skin-friendliness of the flexible display with exceptional water-vapour transmission rate. Therefore, engineering the skin-friendly natural leather showed intriguing advantages to achieve durable, high-quality electroluminescent displaying and high-performance EMI shielding performances.