Highly compressive aerogel-elastomer hybrid porous material with redistributed strain for high-sensitive soft pressure sensors

Abstract

Owing to the good sensitivity and simple fabrication process, flexible piezoresistive pressure sensors based on aerogels shows great applications in soft robotics, bioelectronics and so on. However, the poor compressibility and stability of the aerogel is still challenging the development of aerogel based flexible piezoresistive pressure sensors, simultaneously, it is urgent to pave a way to enhance the sensitivity of these sensors. Here, for the first time, we propose a universal strategy to prepare aerogel skeleton-elastomer shell hybrid porous material with enhanced compressibility for high-sensitive and stable flexible pressure sensors. We found that the elastomer shell disperses the strain in the aerogel skeleton and enhances the compressibility of the aerogel, which improve the stability of the sensor (10000 cycles of compression). More importantly, there are elastomer micro-blocks formed in the hybrid material, these micro-blocks redistribute the strain in the material which contributes to the high sensitivity (10.25 kPa−1) of the sensors. Furthermore, the sensors are successful in monitoring both of the large joint bending and subtle skin vibration, as well as remote controlling toy car and artificial hand. This work provides an effective and universal strategy to enhance the sensitivity and stability of the aerogel based flexible pressure sensors and promotes their development towards practical applications.