The elastic nature of π-conjugated polymer gels makes it difficult to process them using traditional coating techniques and inkjet printing, and as injectable gels, thereby limiting the use of preprocessing and storing the polymers as gels. Taking cues from the easy processability of reversible and thixotropic non-π-conjugated polymer gels, we report herein for the first time a simple strategy to obtain reversible and thixotropic π-conjugated polymer ionic network (π-PIN) gels. Reversible and thixotropic π-PIN gels are generated by synergistically combining the intriguing properties of π-conjugated polymers with the dynamic properties of ionically cross-linked networks.
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