Highly Sensitive Ultrathin Flexible Thermoplastic Polyurethane/Carbon Black Fibrous Film Strain Sensor with Adjustable Scaffold Networks

Abstract

In recently years, high-performance wearable strain sensors have attracted great attention in academic and industrial. Herein, a conductive polymer composite of electrospun thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) fibrous film matrix-embedded carbon black (CB) particles with adjustable scaffold network was fabricated for high-sensitive strain sensor. This work indicated the influence of stereoscopic scaffold network structure built under various rotating speeds of collection device in electrospinning process on the electrical response of TPU/CB strain sensor. This structure makes the sensor exhibit combined characters of high sensitivity under stretching strain (gauge factor of 8962.7 at 155% strain), fast response time (60 ms), outstanding stability and durability (> 10,000 cycles) and a widely workable stretching range (0–160%). This high-performance, wearable, flexible strain sensor has a broad vision of application such as intelligent terminals, electrical skins, voice measurement and human motion monitoring. Moreover, a theoretical approach was used to analyze mechanical property and a model based on tunneling theory was modified to describe the relative change of resistance upon the applied strain. Meanwhile, two equations based from this model were first proposed and offered an effective but simple approach to analyze the change of number of conductive paths and distance of adjacent conductive particles.

Materials, Electrical Performance, Mechanisms, Applications, and Manufacturing Approaches for Flexible Strain Sensors

“…(D) Sensing application of the strain sensor when monitoring speaking different words with sample fixing at neck. Reproduced with the permission from [188], copyright the Springer Nature, 2021. (E) Control of avatar fingers in the virtual environment using wireless smart glove system.…”

Flexible Ag Microparticle/MXene-Based Film for Energy Harvesting

“…In general, the current EHFs collect various forms of energy by introducing fillers with different properties including carbon nanotubes, metal nanowires and conducting polymer to the elastic matrix [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Nevertheless, the nanofillers are easy to agglomerate during the preparation process and limit the application in practice [18,19]. Therefore, it is extremely important to select fillers with good dispersion and excellent performance.…”

PVDF-Ni/PE-CNTs Composite Foams with Co-Continuous Structure for Electromagnetic Interference Shielding and Photo-Electro-Thermal Properties

“…Conductive polymer composites (CPCs) with low density, stable chemistry, easy molding and flexible design, are one of the main candidates for replacing metals. [10][11][12] Research has shown that carbon-based materials, such as carbon nanotubes (CNT), carbon fibers (CF) and graphene, are effective conductive fillers for EMI shielding composites. [13-,16] As we all know, EMI shielding mainly includes two aspects: absorption and reflection.…”