Abstract
Flexible and wearable pressure sensors have attracted significant attention owing to their roles in healthcare monitoring and human–machine interfaces. In this study, we introduce a wide-range, highly sensitive, stable, reversible, and biocompatible pressure sensor based on a porous Ecoflex with tilted air-gap-structured and carbonized cotton fabric (CCF) electrodes. The knitted structure of electrodes demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed sensor in enhancing the pressure-sensing performance in comparison to a woven structure due to the inherent properties of naturally generated space. In addition, the presence of tilted air gaps in the porous elastomer provided high deformability, thereby significantly improving the sensor sensitivity compared to other dielectric structures that have no or vertical air gaps. The combination of knitted CCF electrodes and the porous dielectric with tilted air gaps achieved a sensitivity of 24.5 × 10−3 kPa−1 at 100 kPa, along with a wide detection range (1 MPa). It is also noteworthy that this novel method is low-cost, facile, scalable, and ecofriendly. Finally, the proposed sensor integrated into a smart glove detected human motions of grasping water cups, thus demonstrating its potential applications in wearable electronics.
Highlights
Flexible pressure sensors have received tremendous attention due to their potential in monitoring human health [1,2,3], human–machine interaction systems [4,5], and intelligent robotics [6,7,8]
Several methodologies have been developed to tune the performance of capacitive pressure sensors, which are mostly determined by the deformability of the dielectric layer
The surface morphology of the carbonized cotton fabric (CCF)-based capacitive pressure sensor was obtained by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) (GeminiSEM 300, Carl Zeiss, Oberkochen, Germany)
Summary
Flexible pressure sensors have received tremendous attention due to their potential in monitoring human health [1,2,3], human–machine interaction systems [4,5], and intelligent robotics [6,7,8]. Numerous strategies have been proposed to develop pressure sensors with excellent sensing performance based on various sensing mechanisms, including piezoresistive [9,10], capacitive [11,12,13,14], piezoelectric [15,16], and triboelectric effects [17]. Among these approaches, a capacitive-type pressure sensor has attracted the most interest owing to its fast response, high reversibility, temperature insensitivity, simple structure and fabrication process, and low power consumption [18,19]. This method requires time-consuming, expensive, and complicated process steps to fabricate the microstructure silicone mold
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