Ultrasensitive, Highly Stable, and Flexible Strain Sensor Inspired by Nature

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 14; no. 14; pp. 16885 - 16893
• Main Authors: Wang, Jingxiang, Liu, Linpeng, Yang, Chen, Zhang, Changchao, Li, Bo, Meng, Xiancun, Ma, Guoliang, Wang, Dakai, Zhang, Junqiu, Niu, Shichao, Zhao, Jiale, Han, Zhiwu, Yao, Zhongwen, Ren, Luquan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 13.04.2022
• Subjects: Electronics; Humans; Monitoring, Physiologic; Motion; Surfaces, Interfaces, and Applications; Wearable Electronic Devices; flexible strain sensor; ultrasensitivity; high stability; combined bionic; spiderweb-like reticular structure
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.2c01127

For advanced flexible strain sensors, it is not difficult to achieve high sensitivity only. However, integrating high sensitivity, high stability, and high durability into one sensor still remains a great challenge. Fortunately, natural creatures with diversified excellent performances have given us a lot of ready-made solutions. Here, scorpion and spiderweb are selected as coupling bionic prototypes, which are famous for their ultrasensitive sensing capacity and excellent structural durability, respectively. Based on that, a bioinspired strain sensor is successfully fabricated. The results demonstrate that the bioinspired strain sensor has a sensitivity of 940.5 in the strain range of 0–1.5% and a sensitivity of 2742.3 between 1.5 and 2.5%. Meantime, this sensor with a spiderweb-like reticular structure has a great improvement in stability and durability. Specifically, the sensor exhibits excellent stability during bending and stretching cycles over 80,000 times. Moreover, the response time and recovery time of the sensor are 169 and 195 ms, respectively. Besides, the sensor also has functions such as vibrating frequency identification due to its low hysteresis. Based on the excellent performance, the sensor can be applied to monitor human body motions serving as wearable electronics.