Woven Organic Crystals

Woven architectures such as textiles are prepared by interlacing fibrous components to expand one-dimensional material into two dimensional sheets with enhanced strength and resilience to wear owing to physically entangled, chemically unlinked components. Here we capitalize on the newly realized elastic properties of organic crystals to prepare an array of centimeter-size woven network structures that resemble patches of conventional fabrics. Taking plain woven fabric as the subject, the crystal fabric prepared in this way has good firmness and mechanical enhancement based on the cooperative force between the warp and weft crystals. Since some crystals have satisfactory resistance to high and low temperatures, the corresponding crystalline fabrics also have excellent temperature adaptability, as shown by the ability to bend repeatedly in the range of –196 to 150 °C. In a broader context, we present a model of a 2D optical waveguide array based on crystalline fabrics, suggesting that organic crystalline fabrics are promising lightweight materials for flexible optoelectronic devices. (The contents of the dataset conclude Chemical formula and Source files for all Origin charts.)