Highly Sensitive Multifilament Fiber Strain Sensors with Ultrabroad Sensing Range for Textile Electronics

Abstract

Highly stretchable fiber strain sensors are one of the most important components for various applications in wearable electronics, electronic textiles, and biomedical electronics. Herein, we present a facile approach for fabricating highly stretchable and sensitive fiber strain sensors by embedding Ag nanoparticles into a stretchable fiber with a multifilament structure. The multifilament structure and Ag-rich shells of the fiber strain sensor enable the sensor to simultaneously achieve both a high sensitivity and largely wide sensing range despite its simple fabrication process and components. The fiber strain sensor simultaneously exhibits ultrahigh gauge factors (∼9.3 × 10 and ∼659 in the first stretching and subsequent stretching, respectively), a very broad strain-sensing range (450 and 200% for the first and subsequent stretching, respectively), and high durability for more than 10 000 stretching cycles. The fiber strain sensors can also be readily integrated into a glove to control a hand robot and effectively applied to monitor the large volume expansion of a balloon and a pig bladder for an artificial bladder system, thereby demonstrating the potential of the fiber strain sensors as candidates for electronic textiles, wearable electronics, and biomedical engineering.

Significance of Nanomaterials in Wearables: A Review on Wearable Actuators and Sensors

“…[83] Additionally, they must possess the following characteristics: high stretchability for monitoring largescale human activities (such as stretching, torsion, and bending movements of the human limbs, ε > 100%), high sensitivity for detection of tiny-scale motions (such as delicate movements caused by heartbeat, pulse, swallowing, and facial microexpression, ε ≈ 0.1%), and fast response/recovery speeds for real-time monitoring. [114] Currently, to solve these issues, various nanomaterials and nanocomposites (such as polymer nanofibers, metals or metal oxides nanowires, graphene, carbon nanotubes, and nanohybrid materials) are being employed to construct outstanding wearable strain sensor, since trimming down to nanoscale, nanostructures have an intrinsically large surface area in conjunction with excellent mechanical and electrical properties, thereby giving it the advantage of using smaller amount of active materials to build a high-efficiency percolation conductive network while maintaining high stretchability and then providing www.advmat.de www.advancedsciencenews.com a new opportunity to develop high-performance sensors [111,[115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122] ( Table 2). [114] Currently, to solve these issues, various nanomaterials and nanocomposites (such as polymer nanofibers, metals or metal oxides nanowires, graphene, carbon nanotubes, and nanohybrid materials) are being employed to construct outstanding wearable strain sensor, since trimming down to nanoscale, nanostructures have an intrinsically large surface area in conjunction with excellent mechanical and electrical properties, thereby giving it the advantage of using smaller amount of active materials to build a high-efficiency percolation conductive network while maintaining high stretchability and then providing www.advmat.de www.advancedsciencenews.com a new opportunity to develop high-performance sensors [111,[115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122] ( Table 2).…”

Mimicking Human and Biological Skins for Multifunctional Skin Electronics

“…Introduction of stretchable substrates can improve the working range of crack‐based sensors . Although these sensors have lower gauge factors than nanoscale crack sensors in the narrow sensing ranges (<2%), they are suitable for applications requiring the detection of significant deformation, such as for wearable motion sensing.…”

Textile‐Based Strain Sensor for Human Motion Detection

“…Lewis et al fabricated multicore‐shell fibers to achieve capacitive fiber strain sensors with high sensing range of up to 250% strain and a GF of ~0.35. Recently, Lee et al fabricated highly sensitive and stretchable fiber‐shaped strain sensors with core‐sheath structure by immersing stretchable polyurethane fiber that possessed a coalesced multi‐microfilament structure into a silver ion‐containing solution and subsequently reducing the silver ions into particles. This sensor had large initial conductivity with the value of 20 964 S cm −1 , high gauge factor, extensive strain‐sensing range, and superior durability over 10 000 cycles.…”