A Highly Sensitive, Reliable, and High‐Temperature‐Resistant Flexible Pressure Sensor Based on Ceramic Nanofibers

Abstract

Flexible pressure sensors are essential components for soft electronics by providing physiological monitoring capability for wearables and tactile perceptions for soft robotics. Flexible pressure sensors with reliable performance are highly desired yet challenging to construct to meet the requirements of practical applications in daily activities and even harsh environments, such as high temperatures. This work describes a highly sensitive and reliable capacitive pressure sensor based on flexible ceramic nanofibrous networks with high structural elasticity, which minimizes performance degradation commonly seen in polymer‐based sensors because of the viscoelastic behavior of polymers. Such ceramic pressure sensors exhibit high sensitivity (≈4.4 kPa−1), ultralow limit of detection (<0.8 Pa), fast response speed (<16 ms) as well as low fatigue over 50 000 loading/unloading cycles. The high stability is attributed to the excellent mechanical stability of the ceramic nanofibrous network. By employing textile‐based electrodes, a fully breathable and wearable ceramic pressure sensor is demonstrated for real‐time health monitoring and motion detection. Owing to the high‐temperature resistance of ceramics, the ceramic nanofibrous network sensor can function properly at temperatures up to 370 °C, showing great promise for harsh environment applications.

Intelligent Soft Surgical Robots for Next‐Generation Minimally Invasive Surgery

“…They usually have better stretchability, better softness, better compatibility, and higher sensitivity and have been richly developed in recent years. [359][360][361][362] In addition to capacitive and resistive types that can also be used to measure strain, commonly used ones also include piezoresistive and triboelectric types. [360] The mechanisms are shown in order in Figure 14g.…”

Recent progress in flexible tactile sensor systems: from design to application

“…As-fabricated, the nanostructured capacitor features an air gap between pillars sandwiched between the upper and lower electrodes, so that both the overlapped area and distance, as well as the effective dielectric constant, are changed with applied pressure [42] . Beyond the traditional capacitive sensor, the ionic sensor based on ion-interfacial sensing has been widely investigated in recent years because of its unique double electrode layer structure [43][44][45] . For instance, Bai et al [44] reported an ionic sensor based on a graded intrafillable architecture with a high sensitivity (> 220 kPa -1 ) in an ultra-broad sensing range (0.08 Pa-360 kPa).…”

Recent Advances in Applications of Ceramic Nanofibers

“…The ceramic nanofibers have been extensively studied for gas sensing applications due to their advantages such as good directional carrier transport, high surface energy, large surface-to-volume ratio, high chemical stability, great sensing performance. Ceramics are inherently resistant to aggressive physical and corrosive chemical circumstances and they offer significantly minimized hysteresis with increased relaxation time, which improves the stability, performance, and response time of pressure sensors [87]. Many researchers showed the applicability of electrospun ceramic nanofibers in gas sensing applications for detection of many different gases such as acetone [34,49,[88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97], ethanol [98][99][100][101], formaldehyde [102], ammonia [103][104][105][106][107], hydrogen sulfide [108], nitrogen dioxide [109][110][111], acetic acid [112], carbon monoxide [113,114], hydrogen [115], and toluene [116].…”

“…CNFs were also utilized in development of highly sensitive and reliable capacitive pressure sensors. Using flexible TiO 2 ceramic nanofibrous networks, Fu et al [87] developed a capacitive pressure sensor and studied the capacitance-to-pressure Recent Advances in Applications of Ceramic Nanofibers DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97118…”

“…Nuray Kizildag Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Research and Application Center, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey *Address all correspondence to: nuray.kizildag@sabanciuniv.edu sensitivity. The ceramic pressure sensors, which exhibited high sensitivity (≈4.4 k Pa −1 ), fast response speed (<16 ms), ultralow limit of detection (<0.8 Pa), low fatigue over 50000 loading/unloading cycles, high temperature stability, were suggested for use as real-time health monitoring and motion detection [87].…”