Carbon nanotubes/acetylene black/Ecoflex with corrugated microcracks for enhanced sensitivity for stretchable strain sen
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Carbon nanotubes/acetylene black/Ecoflex with corrugated microcracks for enhanced sensitivity for stretchable strain sensors Yue Zhang1 · Erhui Ren1 · Hong Tang1 · Ang Li1 · Ce Cui1 · Ronghui Guo1 · Mi Zhou1 · Shouxiang Jiang2 · Hong Shen1 Received: 11 March 2020 / Accepted: 8 July 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The booming development of wearable devices especially flexible strain sensors has attracted widespread attention in human motion detection. Although many microstructures have been studied for sensing functions, the manufacture of strain sensors with excellent sensitivity and wide detection range remains a challenge. Herein, a corrugated microcrack structure was designed by the simple method of dripping carbon nanotubes (CNTsi)/acetylene black (AB) conductive mixture onto prestretched Ecoflex. This corrugated microcracks can effectively improve the sensitivity of the strain sensor. Compared with the CNTs/AB/Ecoflex-based strain sensor without pre-stretching (gauge factor (GF) of 340 within 0–25% strain and 207.58 for a strain of 38,100%), the strain sensor with corrugated microcracks through pre-stretching is significantly improved. GF is up to 1610 at the strain of 50–100% without sacrificing the strain detection range at the prestrains coefficient of 60%. In addition, the strain sensor with the structure of corrugated microcracks also demonstrates excellent performance including high elongation at break (up to 400% strain), great durability, and repeatability (> 1000 cycles). The CNTs/AB/Ecoflex-based strain sensor is successfully assembled on human to monitor the activity of joints, demonstrating its ability to be a promising candidate in wearable electronic devices.
1 Introduction As an important part of wearable electronic devices, flexible strain sensors have attracted considerable attention in the application of electronic skin, medical monitoring, human–computer interaction [1], and intelligent robots [2], which have become a hot research field. Wearable strain sensors need sufficient flexibility [3] (tensile strain ≥ 50%) to effectively fit on human skin to track complex and large movements. Previously, traditional substrates such as metals and semiconductors have less deformation. The response of sensing often fails when such stretchable electronic devices are mounted on human skin due to the mechanical mismatch between such stretchable electronic devices with the soft * Ronghui Guo [email protected] * Hong Shen [email protected] 1
College of Biomass Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Institute of Textiles and Clothing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
2
tissue of the human body [4]. Recently, emerging flexible polymer substrates with excellent stretchability have shown great application prospects in flexible wearable devices. Polydimethylsiloxane [5], Ecoflex, polyurethane [6], and silicone rubber are widely used as elastic substrates to make sensors. For the cond
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