Highly conductive 1D-2D composite film for skin-mountable strain sensor and stretchable triboelectric nanogenerator

Abstract

The growing demand of intelligent wearable devices has triggered rapid development of highly stretchable strain sensors and power sources. Here, we fabricated a sandwich-structured stretchable device, where a composite film is encapsulated in two layers of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The highly conductive composite film is composed of one-dimensional (1D) silver nanowires (AgNWs) network wrapped with two-dimensional (2D) metallic MoS2 nanosheets. The combination of 1D AgNWs and 2D metallic MoS2 nanosheets endows the composite film with excellent flexibility and conductivity, which enables their use as high-performance skin-mountable strain sensor with the maximum gauge factor of 215.4 and high stretchability up to 70%. Furthermore, the sandwich-structured device can serve as a stretchable triboelectric nanogenerator (STENG). Results show that the STENG with an area of 1 × 2.5 cm2 could produce an average power density of 0.16 W/m2. In addition, the STENG could retain stable output performance even under a stretching ratio of 50%. With the outstanding stretchability, it can be fully conformal on nonplanar irregular object such as plant leaves. Moreover, we demonstrated that the fabricated STENG could harvest wind energy and serve as a self-powered wind speed sensor when attached to plant leaves. This work provides new prospects for stretchable power sources and shows potential applications in wearable electronics.