Issue 6, 2019

Ultrasensitive, flexible, and low-cost nanoporous piezoresistive composites for tactile pressure sensing

Abstract

Highly sensitive flexible tactile sensors are of continuing interest for various applications including wearable devices, human–machine interface systems, and internet of things. Current technologies for high sensitivity piezoresistive sensors rely on costly materials and/or fabrication methods such as graphene-based and micro-structured composites limiting accessibility and scalability. Here, we report a facile sacrificial casting–etching method to synthesize nanoporous carbon nanotube/polymer composites for ultra-sensitive and low-cost piezoresistive pressure sensors. Our synthesis method overcomes the limitations of the traditional solution-dip-coating method for adhering nanoscale conductive materials to the nanoscale porous surface. Importantly, we show ultra-high sensitivity with a strain gauge factor over 300, which is ∼50 times higher than that of traditional CNT-based piezoresistive sensors and ∼10 times higher than that of most of the graphene-based ones. For practical tactile sensing applications, we demonstrate that the sensors can detect both gentle pressures (1 Pa–1 kPa) and low pressures (1 kPa–25 kPa) with a fraction of the cost. Our nanoporous polymer composite could contribute to expanding the scope of using nanocomposites for applications including subtle locomotion sensing, interactive human–machine interface systems, and internet of things from its easy tunability for sensing diverse range of tactile signals.

Graphical abstract: Ultrasensitive, flexible, and low-cost nanoporous piezoresistive composites for tactile pressure sensing

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
09 دسمبر 2018
Accepted
02 جنؤری 2019
First published
03 جنؤری 2019

Nanoscale, 2019,11, 2779-2786

Ultrasensitive, flexible, and low-cost nanoporous piezoresistive composites for tactile pressure sensing

J. Li, S. Orrego, J. Pan, P. He and S. H. Kang, Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 2779 DOI: 10.1039/C8NR09959F

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements