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Abstract
Environmental issues promote the development of sensors based on natural polymers which are becoming an area of increasing interest. Piezoresistive sensors based on silk fibroin with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as fillers were produced by solvent-casting in order to tune their electrical conductivity and electromechanical responses. It is shown that the carbonaceous fillers are well dispersed in the polymer matrix and the thermal and mechanical properties are independent of the CNT content. On the other hand, the inclusion of CNTs reduces the β-sheet content of silk fibroin and the electrical properties of the composite strongly depend on the filler content, the percolation threshold being around 1 wt% CNTs. The piezoresistive response demonstrates good reproducibility during cyclic loading without hysteresis with a piezoresistive sensitivity of ∼4 MPa−1, regardless of the CNT content. Overall, the results confirm that polymer composites based on natural polymers exhibit excellent piezoresistive responses, also demonstrated by the implementation and testing of a pressure sensor with the corresponding readout electronics. Thus, it is shown that natural polymers such as silk fibroin will allow the development of a new generation of multifunctional force and deformation sensors.
Highlights
Remarkable achievements have been obtained with polymer composites allowing the improvement of their thermal, mechanical and electrical properties for application in areas such as construction, electronics, consumer products, sensors and actuators, biological applications, and energy, among others.[1,2,3]The main recent focus is to obtain high performance composite materials based on natural polymers and biopolymers, in order to reduce the use of polymers obtained from aBCMaterials, Basque Center for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures, UPV/EHU Science Park, 48940 Leioa, Spain
Piezoresistive sensors based on silk fibroin with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as fillers were produced by solvent-casting in order to tune their electrical conductivity and electromechanical responses
The inclusion of CNTs reduces the b-sheet content of silk fibroin and the electrical properties of the composite strongly depend on the filler content, the percolation threshold being around 1 wt% CNTs
Summary
Remarkable achievements have been obtained with polymer composites allowing the improvement of their thermal, mechanical and electrical properties for application in areas such as construction, electronics, consumer products, sensors and actuators, biological applications, and energy, among others.[1,2,3]The main recent focus is to obtain high performance composite materials based on natural polymers and biopolymers, in order to reduce the use of polymers obtained from aBCMaterials, Basque Center for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures, UPV/EHU Science Park, 48940 Leioa, Spain. E-mail: cmscosta@ sica.uminho.pt dCentro ALGORITMI, University of Minho, Campus de Azurem, 4800-058 Guimaraes, Portugal eEngageLab, University of Minho, 4810-453 Guimaraes, Portugal fInstitute for Polymers and Composites IPC/i3N, University of Minho, 4800-058 Guimaraes, Portugal gCenter of Chemistry, University of Minho, 4710-058 Braga, Portugal hIkerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013 Bilbao, Spain crude oil, while maintaining functional performance.[4] The pre x ‘bio’ in biopolymers means that they are produced from biological sources, including biomass – e.g. agro-polymers – as well as by microbial production or other living organisms.[5,6] Starches, pectins, chitosan/chitin, collagen/gelatin, poly(hydroxybutyrate) (PHB), poly(lactic acid) (PLA), or silk broin (SF) are some of the more reported biopolymers in the literature.[5]
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