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Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes

Nowadays, with the development of wearable devices, stretchable pressure sensors have been widely adopted in all kinds of areas. Most of the sensors aim to detect small pressure, such as fingertip tactile sensing, but only a few are focused on high-pressure sensing, such as foot pressure sensing dur...

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Autores principales: Zhang, Lunjia, Gao, Meng, Wang, Ronghang, Deng, Zhongshan, Gui, Lin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6471364/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30884767
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19061316
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author Zhang, Lunjia
Gao, Meng
Wang, Ronghang
Deng, Zhongshan
Gui, Lin
author_facet Zhang, Lunjia
Gao, Meng
Wang, Ronghang
Deng, Zhongshan
Gui, Lin
author_sort Zhang, Lunjia
collection PubMed
description Nowadays, with the development of wearable devices, stretchable pressure sensors have been widely adopted in all kinds of areas. Most of the sensors aim to detect small pressure, such as fingertip tactile sensing, but only a few are focused on high-pressure sensing, such as foot pressure sensing during men’s walking. In this work, a liquid metal-based stretchable sensor for large-pressure measurement is investigated. This sensor is fully stretchable because it is made of soft materials. However, when the soft sensor is subjected to high pressure, the liquid metal easily leaks from microchannels because it maintains the liquid state at room temperature. We therefore propose to fabricate liquid metal-based leakage-free electrodes to handle the liquid-metal leak. Parametric studies are conducted to compare this sensor with liquid-metal-only electrodes and leakage-free electrodes. The leakage-free electrodes increase the measurement ranges from 0.18, 0.18, and 0.15 MPa to 0.44 MPa, with higher linearity and precision. The improvement in the liquid-metal electrode enables the sensors to work stably within 0.44 MPa pressure and 20% strain. In addition, we integrate two capacitors, namely, a working capacitor and a reference capacitor, into one sensor to reduce the influence of parasitic capacitance brought about by external interference. This stretchable capacitive sensor capable of working under a wide range of pressure with good repeatability, sensitivity, and linearity, exhibits great potential use for wearable electronics. Finally, the method for fabricating leakage-free electrodes shows great value for hyperelastic electronics manufacturing and micromachine technology.
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spelling pubmed-64713642019-04-26 Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes Zhang, Lunjia Gao, Meng Wang, Ronghang Deng, Zhongshan Gui, Lin Sensors (Basel) Article Nowadays, with the development of wearable devices, stretchable pressure sensors have been widely adopted in all kinds of areas. Most of the sensors aim to detect small pressure, such as fingertip tactile sensing, but only a few are focused on high-pressure sensing, such as foot pressure sensing during men’s walking. In this work, a liquid metal-based stretchable sensor for large-pressure measurement is investigated. This sensor is fully stretchable because it is made of soft materials. However, when the soft sensor is subjected to high pressure, the liquid metal easily leaks from microchannels because it maintains the liquid state at room temperature. We therefore propose to fabricate liquid metal-based leakage-free electrodes to handle the liquid-metal leak. Parametric studies are conducted to compare this sensor with liquid-metal-only electrodes and leakage-free electrodes. The leakage-free electrodes increase the measurement ranges from 0.18, 0.18, and 0.15 MPa to 0.44 MPa, with higher linearity and precision. The improvement in the liquid-metal electrode enables the sensors to work stably within 0.44 MPa pressure and 20% strain. In addition, we integrate two capacitors, namely, a working capacitor and a reference capacitor, into one sensor to reduce the influence of parasitic capacitance brought about by external interference. This stretchable capacitive sensor capable of working under a wide range of pressure with good repeatability, sensitivity, and linearity, exhibits great potential use for wearable electronics. Finally, the method for fabricating leakage-free electrodes shows great value for hyperelastic electronics manufacturing and micromachine technology. MDPI 2019-03-15 /pmc/articles/PMC6471364/ /pubmed/30884767 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19061316 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Zhang, Lunjia
Gao, Meng
Wang, Ronghang
Deng, Zhongshan
Gui, Lin
Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes
title Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes
title_full Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes
title_fullStr Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes
title_full_unstemmed Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes
title_short Stretchable Pressure Sensor with Leakage-Free Liquid-Metal Electrodes
title_sort stretchable pressure sensor with leakage-free liquid-metal electrodes
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6471364/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30884767
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19061316
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