Fabrication, characterization and modelling of the fabric electrode-based highly stretchable capacitive strain sensor

Abstract

Highly stretchable and capacitance-based strain sensors were fabricated utilizing highly stretchable silicone elastomer as dielectric film sandwiched between the conducting and stretchable cloth-based top and bottom electrodes. Electromechanical characterizations for the proposed sensor after multiple and reversible loading and unloading cycles up to 150% applied strain were conducted followed by the modelling of the sensing performance. It has been shown that the sensor exhibits reproducible electromechanical performance under multiple reversible stretching and relaxation cycles. There was a very small deviation (< 10%) in the observed values of the capacitance upon the applied strain of 150% up to the 1000 loading and unloading cycles. Tensile measurement for the sensor under various applied strains, not only exhibits almost constant force indicating negligible Mullins effect and negligible time-dependent changes at a fixed strain up to 100% suggesting that viscoelastic losses can also be neglected. From uniaxial tensile experiments, constitutive model of the dielectric elastomer sensor was validated. For the fitting of the experimental data obtained from the uniaxial tensile measurement, a variety of strain energy formulations have been compared for predicting the constitutive behaviour of sensor using the Mooney– Rivlin, Neo-Hookean, Yeoh and Ogden models, where 2nd term of the Ogden model was found to explain the experimental tensile data most accurately. To explain some observed losses at 150% of applied strain, the Prony series-based time dependent model was used for predicting stress at any value of time and it was found that experimental data was well fit with 4th order of Prony series.