Although the performance of flexible optoelectronic devices based on CPs has been greatly developed, there has been few of exalting improvement about the intrinsically mechanical properties of materials, which is mainly hindered by the feasible stretching method. The currently developed strategies, such as the water-supported direct tensile test (film-on-water, FOW) or elastomer-supported buckling-based method (film-on-elastomer, FOE), still remain some drawbacks need to be overcome, including how to eliminate the deviation caused by the surface tension of water (73 mN m
-1) [
9,
40]. Herein, we introduced a feasible method taking full advantage of the conventional tensile instrument, for conveniently evaluating mechanical metrics of CPs. The key step in sample preparation is to make transferable film, as shown in step 3 of Figure
3(a). After immersing the spin-coated film in water, the film detached from the quartz substrate and suspended on the water surface. Then, we could readily pick up this film assisted by the specially designed hollow holder and transfer it onto the tensile test fixture (Figure S14, detailed description in methods). The preparation for freestanding membrane is a wholly solution-based process, and suitable for laboratory-scale materials. The images of the floated film taken by AFM (Figure
3(b)) and transmission electron microscope (TEM, Figure
3(c)) revealed that the film spread out under the surface tension of water, and there is no fracture on edge. Figure
3(d) is the typical stress-strain curves obtained by this strategy with a loading rate of 0.005 N/min, while Figure
3(f) shows Young’s modulus of P1-P4 and the preferred sample (PODPF). We have performed this tensile test for several samples of each CPs, in order to minimize the combined effect of inhomogeneity in film thickness as well as aggregate domains in film morphology. Obviously, we observed that all the CPs were brittle fracture, and the curves after the fracture point in P1, P3, and P4 resulted from film tearing under stress instead of plastic yielding. The elongation at fracture for P3 and P4 was 19% and 25%, larger than other samples, which were 13% for P1, 11% for P2, and 7% for PODPF. In respect to Young’s modulus of samples that the amide ratios were below 20%, no clear tendency was observed, and their mean values were approximately 200 MPa for P1, P2, and PODPF. When the amide ratio reached 30%, the mean elastic modulus increased slightly to 255 MPa, and when the amide ratio reached 40%, it further increased significantly to 400 MPa. Compared to P3HT tensile modulus (
) obtained through FOW and FOE methods [
9,
41–
43], as summarized in Table S3, the modulus of CPs measured through our tensile strategy were on the same order of magnitude and a slightly higher than the reported values. We attributed this mainly to the discrepancy of molecular structure rigidity of fluorene and thiophene, and beyond this, the sample thickness and the strain rate applied on the films also account for this discrepancy. Furthermore, we carried out nanoindentation test to evaluate their mechanical properties, which has been widely applied in the research of crystal and metal, but rarely for CPs [
44]. Figure
3(e) shows the load-displacement data at different load depths: 60, 120, and 180 nm. The elastic modulus (
) (Figure
3(g)) and hardness (
) (Figure
3(h)) were, respectively, calculated according to formulas (
1) and (
2), as shown in supplied methods. We observed that the
values attained by nanoindentation were tens of times larger than Young’s modulus measured by the tensile test, which was slightly increased from 16 GPa of PODPF to 20 GPa of P3 and decreased to 15 GPa of P4 under the loading depth of 180 nm. These results were in consistent with the nanoindentation results of polyfluorene derivatives reported by Zeng et al. [
45], and the slight discrepancy may result from the indenter shape. We speculate that the enhancement was resulted from the chain entanglement induced by hydrogen bond cross-linking. As for the abrupt decrease, we infer it may be the result of the rough morphology and the fluffy feature induced by the gelation of P4. Despite no identified tendency in the
values, these results were closer to the tensile modulus obtained from the tensile test. On the other hand, these values showed to gradually increase as the loading depth increase, which ascribed to the substrate effect under larger loading depth. Therefore, nanoindentation is not the preferred method for testing the thin film of conjugated polymer. We also characterized their stretchability through the FOE method by using a simple biaxial tension device (Figure S15). We observed that PODPF and P1 emerged cracks under 5% strain, and all the polymers showed lots of cracks under 10% strain. But for P3 and P4, their films were still consecutive, and until the strain reached to 15%, all the films were cracked (Figure S16). However, because we cannot manipulate this loading rate precisely, we did not obtain the accurate Young’s modulus. Taking these observations into consideration, we were more convinced about the effectiveness and practicability of this tensile strategy. We believed that, as stress dissipation parts, the reversible hydrogen bonds have a remarkable contribution for enhancing the stretchability of semiconductor polymers.