Facile Preparation of Hybrid Structure based on Meso-dome and Micro-pillar Array as Flexible Electronic Skin with Tunable Sensitivity and Detection Range.

Abstract

The development of flexible pressure sensor has attracted increasing research interest from wearable electronic skins to human healthcare monitoring. Herein, we demonstrated a piezoresistive pressure sensor based on AgNWs-coated hybrid architecture consisting of meso-scaled dome and micro-scaled pillar arrays. We experimentally showed that the key three-dimensional component for a pressure sensor can be conveniently acquired using the vacuum application during the spin-coating process instead of sophisticated and expensive approach. The demonstrated hybrid structure exhibits dramatically improved sensing capability when compared with the conventional onefold dome-based counterpart in terms of the sensitivity and detectable pressure range. The optimized sensing performance, by integrating D1000 dome and D50P100 MPA, reaches superior sensitivity of 128.29 kPa-1 (0-200 Pa), 1.28 kPa-1 (0.2-10 kPa), 0.26 kPa-1 (10-80 kPa), and the detection limit of 2.5 Pa with excellent durability. As a proof-of-concept, the pressure sensor based on the hybrid configuration was demonstrated as a versatile platform to accurately monitor kinds of physical signals or pressure sources, e.g. wrist pulse, voice vibration, finger bending/touching, gas flowing, as well as addressing spatial loading. We believe that the proposed architecture and developed methodology can be promising for future applications including flexible electronic devices, artificial skins, and interactive robotics.