Abstract
In this paper, a biological template method is introduced and investigated to fabricate ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) strain sensor with bionic hierarchical structures. We utilized the multi-level structure of reed leaf surface, which can improve the contact area between the substrate and the electrode layers. Hierarchical structures were observed on the IPMC samples, including pyramid strips with the width in the range of 60–80 μm as well as synaptic scatters with diameter around 10 μm. In addition, five kinds of sensors with different interface structures were obtained by combining the traditional microneedle roller roughening and chemical plating processes. It was found that the IPMC sensor with reed-leaf and microneedle structure on each side presented the best performance, along with a high linearity, a sensitivity of 62.5 mV/1% and a large generated voltage peak under given mechanical stimuli, which is 3.7 times that of the sample fabricated without roughening.
Highlights
Owing to the growing demand of arbitrary surface sensing in soft electro-mechanical systems, such as wearable electronic equipment and artificial intelligent devices, soft strain sensors have been explored extensively due to their inherent advantages including biocompatibility, high flexibility and sensitivity, as well as large sensing range (Amjadi et al, 2016; Gao et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2019; Dong et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2020)
Ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) samples with Palladium (Pd) and gold (Au) electrodes were fabricated to evaluate the influence of biological structure on the sensing properties of ionic sensor
In order to distinguish the surface structure characteristics, the Nafion films processed after the first impregnationreduction plating (IRP) were observed with scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
Summary
Owing to the growing demand of arbitrary surface sensing in soft electro-mechanical systems, such as wearable electronic equipment and artificial intelligent devices, soft strain sensors have been explored extensively due to their inherent advantages including biocompatibility, high flexibility and sensitivity, as well as large sensing range (Amjadi et al, 2016; Gao et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2019; Dong et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2020). Ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) is a typical ionic strain sensor with promising electro-mechanical conversion performance (Ming et al, 2018) It is usually consisting of an ionic exchange membrane sandwiched between two electrode layers. A biological template method in combination with chemical plating was proposed to fabricate IPMC sensors with bionic hierarchical structures. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) solution was utilized to cast a film with contrary structure of biological surface as an intermediate process. Afterwards, separate the PDMS film with contrary structure from the reed leaf, cut it into a size of 6 × 6 cm and attach it to the bottom of the glass mold for process. IPMC samples with Palladium (Pd) and gold (Au) electrodes were fabricated to evaluate the influence of biological structure on the sensing properties of ionic sensor. Where V0 is the initial voltage when the IPMC is in free state
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