Capacitive Pressure Sensor with High Sensitivity and Fast Response to Dynamic Interaction Based on Graphene and Porous Nylon Networks

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 10; no. 15; pp. 12816 - 12823
• Main Authors: He, Zhongfu, Chen, Wenjun, Liang, Binghao, Liu, Changyong, Yang, Leilei, Lu, Dongwei, Mo, Zichao, Zhu, Hai, Tang, Zikang, Gui, Xuchun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 18.04.2018
• Subjects: Graphite - chemistry; Nylons; Porosity; Pressure; Touch; flexible electronics; sandwich-like structure; graphene; capacitive pressure sensor; nylon netting
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b01050

Flexible pressure sensors are of great importance to be applied in artificial intelligence and wearable electronics. However, assembling a simple structure, high-performance capacitive pressure sensor, especially for monitoring the flow of liquids, is still a big challenge. Here, on the basis of a sandwich-like structure, we propose a facile capacitive pressure sensor optimized by a flexible, low-cost nylon netting, showing many merits including a high response sensitivity (0.33 kPa–1) in a low-pressure regime (<1 kPa), an ultralow detection limit as 3.3 Pa, excellent working stability after more than 1000 cycles, and synchronous monitoring for human pulses and clicks. More important, this sensor exhibits an ultrafast response speed (<20 ms), which enables its detection for the fast variations of a small applied pressure from the morphological changing processes of a droplet falling onto the sensor. Furthermore, a capacitive pressure sensor array is fabricated for demonstrating the ability to spatial pressure distribution. Our developed pressure sensors show great prospects in practical applications such as health monitoring, flexible tactile devices, and motion detection.