Shu Gong

A wearable and highly sensitive pressure sensor with ultrathin gold nanowires

Ultrathin gold nanowires are mechanically flexible yet robust, which are novel building blocks with potential applications in future wearable optoelectronic devices. Here we report an efficient, low-cost fabrication strategy to construct a highly sensitive, flexible pressure sensor by sandwiching ultrathin gold nanowire-impregnated tissue paper between two thin polydimethylsiloxane sheets. The entire device fabrication process is scalable, enabling facile large-area integration and patterning for mapping spatial pressure distribution. Our gold nanowires-based pressure sensors can be operated at a battery voltage of 1.5 V with low energy consumption (<30 μW), and are able to detect pressing forces as low as 13 Pa with fast response time (<17 ms), high sensitivity (>1.14 kPa(-1)) and high stability (>50,000 loading-unloading cycles). In addition, our sensor can resolve pressing, bending, torsional forces and acoustic vibrations. The superior sensing properties in conjunction with mechanical flexibility and robustness enabled real-time monitoring of blood pulses as well as detection of small vibration forces from music.

Manufacturable Conducting Rubber Ambers and Stretchable Conductors from Copper Nanowire Aerogel Monoliths

We report on a low-cost, simple yet efficient strategy to fabricate ultralightweight aerogel monoliths and conducting rubber ambers from copper nanowires (CuNWs). A trace amount of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) substantially improved the mechanical robustness and elasticity of the CuNW aerogel while maintaining a high electrical conductivity. The resistivity was highly responsive to strains manifesting two distinct domains, and both followed a power law function consistent with pressure-controlled percolation theory. However, the values of the exponents were much less than the predicted value for 3D systems, which may be due to highly porous structures. Remarkably, the CuNW-PVA aerogels could be further embedded into PDMS resin, forming conducting rubber ambers. The ambers could be further manufactured simply by cutting into any arbitrary 1D, 2D, and 3D shapes, which were all intrinsically conductive without the need of external prewiring, a condition required in the previous aerogel-based conductors. The outstanding electrical conductivity in conjunction with high mechanical compliance enabled prototypes of the elastic piezoresistivity switches and stretchable conductors.

Mimosa-inspired design of a flexible pressure sensor with touch sensitivity

A bio-inspired flexible pressure sensor is generated with high sensitivity (50.17 kPa(-1)), quick responding time (<20 ms), and durable stability (negligible loading-unloading signal changes over 10 000 cycles). Notably, the key resource of surface microstructures upon sensor substrates results from the direct molding of natural mimosa leaves, presenting a simple, environment-friendly and easy scale-up fabrication process for these flexible pressure sensors.

Volume-invariant ionic liquid microbands as highly durable wearable biomedical sensors

Most current wearable electronic products are often based on rigid circuit board technologies, limiting their ‘true wearability’ on the soft human body due to the mechanical mismatch between electronic and biological materials. ‘True wearability’, which means intimate contact with the soft human body, can only really be achieved by stretchable electronics that can mimic the mechanical features of the human skin. The use of nanomaterials or wavy metal/semiconductor materials represents a promising strategy to achieve stretchable electronic devices, but such devices often experience local material delamination or cracking. In this work, we describe an ionic liquid (IL)-based approach for the fabrication of rubber band-like, stretchable strain sensors, which can circumvent these limitations. Non-volatile and flow properties allow us simply to ‘fill and seal’ microchannels fabricated by 3D printing to obtain lightweight, waterproof and thermally sensitive wearable sensors. Despite the simplicity of their fabrication, the sensors show excellent performance, including tunable sensitivity, detection of a wide range of strains (0.1–500%), high durability (little change in signal-to-noise ratios after 6 month storage under ambient conditions), an excellent long-term stability of 50 000 life cycles under both low (5%) and high (100%) strains. We further show that our IL-based sensor can accurately identify wrist pulses, and can be woven with commercial rubber bands into colourful bracelets for hand gesture detection, and seamlessly interface with wireless circuitry to allow the detection of cervical movements.

A location- and sharpness-specific tactile electronic skin based on staircase-like nanowire patches

Human skin can sense an external object in a location-specific manner, simultaneously recognizing whether it is sharp or blunt. Such tactile capability can be achieved in both natural and stretched states. It is impractical to mimic this tactile function of human skin by designing pixelated sensor arrays across our whole curvilinear human body. Here, we report a new tactile electronic skin sensor based on staircase-like vertically aligned gold nanowires (V-AuNWs). With a back-to-back linear or spiral assembly of two staircase structures into a single sensor, we are able to recognize pressure in a highly location-specific manner for both non-stretched and stretched states (up to 50% strain); with a concentric design on the fingertip, we can identify the sharpness of an external object. We believe that our strategy opens up a new route to highly specific second-skin-like tactile sensors for electronic skin (E-skin) applications.

Vertical Gold Nanowires Stretchable Electrochemical Electrodes

Conventional electrodes produced from gold or glassy carbon are outstanding electrochemical platforms for biosensing applications due to their chemical inertness and wide electrochemical window, but are intrinsically rigid and planar in nature. Hence, it is challenging to seamlessly integrate them with soft and curvilinear biological tissues for real-time wearable or implantable electronics. In this work, we demonstrate that vertically gold nanowires (v-AuNWs) possess an enokitake-like structure, with the nanoparticle (head) on one side and nanowires (tail) on the opposite side of the structure, and can serve as intrinsically stretchable, electrochemical electrodes due to the stronger nanowire-elastomer bonding forces preventing from interfacial delamination under strains. The exposed head side of the electrode comprising v-AuNWs can achieve a detection limit for H2O2 of 80 μM, with a linear range of 0.2-10.4 mM at 20% strain, with a reasonably high sensitivity using chronoamperometry. This excellent electrochemical performance in the elongated state, in conjunction with low-cost wet-chemistry fabrication, demonstrates that v-AuNWs electrodes may become a next-generation sensing platform for conformally integrated, in vivo biodiagnostics.

Standing Enokitake-like Nanowire Films for Highly Stretchable Elastronics

Stretchable electronics may enable electronic components to be part of our organs-ideal for future wearable/implantable biodiagnostic systems. One of key challenges is failure of the soft/rigid material interface due to mismatching Youngs moduli, which limits stretchability and durability of current systems. Here, we show that standing enokitake-like gold-nanowire-based films chemically bonded to an elastomer can be stretched up to 900% and are highly durable, with >93% conductivity recovery even after 2000 stretching/releasing cycles to 800% strain. Both experimental and modeling reveal that this superior elastic property originates from standing enokitake-like nanowire film structures. The closely packed nanoparticle layer sticks to the top of the nanowires, which easily cracks under strain, whereas the bottom part of the nanowires is compliant with substrate deformation. This leads to tiny V-shaped cracks with a maintained electron transport pathway rather than large U-shaped cracks that are frequently observed for conventional metal films. We further show that our standing nanowire films can serve as current collectors in supercapacitors and second skin-like smart masks for facial expression detection.