TY - JOUR
T1 - A Single-material-printed, Low-cost design for a Carbon-based fabric strain sensor
AU - Chen, Xiaobin
AU - Wang, Fei
AU - Shu, Lin
AU - Tao, Xiaoming
AU - Wei, Lei
AU - Xu, Xiangmin
AU - Zeng, Qing
AU - Huang, Guozhi
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the Tencent Robotics Rhino-Bird Focused Research Project No. 2020-01-001, in part by the Major Science and Technology Projects in Guangdong Province under Grant 2016B010108008, in part by the Technology Programme of Guangzhou under Grants 202002030354 and 202002030262, in part by the Science and Technology Project of Zhongshan under Grant 2019AG024, in part by the Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation under Grant 2018A030310407 , in part by the Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Body Data Science under Grant 201605030011, in part by the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Human Digital Twin under Grant 2022B1212010004, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61972163 and 61806210 , and in part by the Zhongshan Social Public Welfare and Basic Research Project under Grant 2020B2053.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - The manufacturing of flexible strain sensors for wearable electronics usually requires different conductive materials for the sensing part and the connection part. This increases the complexity, cost, and performance issues due to the mismatch of the thermo-electro-mechanical properties of the materials. Herein, a new design scheme using a single conductive material is presented for a low-cost mass-producible fabric strain sensor, where a carbon/silicone nanocomposite is screen-printed to make both parts. By exploring the dimension effect and modelling of the conductive tracks, and adopting a large difference of over 100 times in aspect ratio, this research makes the electrical response of the fabric strain sensor depend almost exclusively on the sensing part, while its connection part has a low resistance. The sensor exhibits outstanding performance with a wide working range (60% strain), adequate linearity, long fatigue life (∼50,000 cycles), and mechanical robustness, rendering it suitable for human body movement detection. Moreover, the manufacturing process is simple and low-cost ($11 per m2). Thus, the new design scheme overcomes the mismatch issue and provides an important reference value for the design of flexible resistive sensors working in a high resistance range, from ∼ 100 KΩ to several MΩ.
AB - The manufacturing of flexible strain sensors for wearable electronics usually requires different conductive materials for the sensing part and the connection part. This increases the complexity, cost, and performance issues due to the mismatch of the thermo-electro-mechanical properties of the materials. Herein, a new design scheme using a single conductive material is presented for a low-cost mass-producible fabric strain sensor, where a carbon/silicone nanocomposite is screen-printed to make both parts. By exploring the dimension effect and modelling of the conductive tracks, and adopting a large difference of over 100 times in aspect ratio, this research makes the electrical response of the fabric strain sensor depend almost exclusively on the sensing part, while its connection part has a low resistance. The sensor exhibits outstanding performance with a wide working range (60% strain), adequate linearity, long fatigue life (∼50,000 cycles), and mechanical robustness, rendering it suitable for human body movement detection. Moreover, the manufacturing process is simple and low-cost ($11 per m2). Thus, the new design scheme overcomes the mismatch issue and provides an important reference value for the design of flexible resistive sensors working in a high resistance range, from ∼ 100 KΩ to several MΩ.
KW - Dimensional effect
KW - Fabric strain sensor
KW - Modelling
KW - Screen printing
KW - Sensor design
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143983613&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.matdes.2022.110926
DO - 10.1016/j.matdes.2022.110926
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85143983613
SN - 0264-1275
VL - 221
JO - Materials and Design
JF - Materials and Design
M1 - 110926
ER -