Low-Cost Thin and Flexible Screen-Printed Pressure Sensor

Abstract

Commercial pressure sensors are often fabricated using well-established silicon micromachining technologies. The thickness and stiffness of silicon-based sensors make them in most cases unsuitable for the integration into materials and surfaces. We present a flexible pressure sensor fabricated by printing technology. Therefore, an intrinsically pressure sensitive ink is screen printed on interdigital electrodes on a thin and flexible foil substrate. The sensor shows sufficient sensitivity and is applicable in a wide pressure range from 0 to 2 MPa. The sensor can completely be fabricated using a low-cost screen printing process. It is very thin and flexible, making it possible to be applied on curved surfaces or to be integrated into materials in a minimal invasive way.

Low-Cost and Highly Sensitive Pressure Sensor with Mold-Printed Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Dispersed in Polydimethylsiloxane

“…Higher concentrations of carbon nanotubes were needed than in the theoretical calculations possibly due to the 10% of agglomerated CNTs. The achieved sensitivities, compared to previous work [ 3 , 26 , 27 ] with carbon-black as a filler, evidence large improvements over the same pressure range, which had a sensitivity of 0.0012% kPa .…”

Advances in Printed Electronic Textiles

“…As a result, they enable applications in electronic skin, robot sensing, wearable health monitoring, and so forth. Printed electronics (PE) are a simple but promising aspect in this regard to produce a wide range of electronic circuits and sensor devices on various flexible substrates [157,230] Available printing techniques include screen, gravure, inkjet, and even 3D printing technologies have been utilized to produce low cost, light weight, large-area, biocompatible and flexible electronic sensor devices such as electrochemical sensors, [231][232][233] enzymatic sensors, [234,235] pressure sensors, [236,237] and strain sensors, [238,239] etc. Among the several printing technologies, screen-printing is a well-established but cheap technique that has been exploited commercially for the fabrication of bio-and chemical sensors.…”

Revolution in Flexible Wearable Electronics for Temperature and Pressure Monitoring—A Review

“…In [131], a low-cost, thin, and flexile screen-printed resistive P sensing instrument for high-pressure application is proposed. Figure 6b shows a rendered image of the sensing instrument.…”

“…Because just the resistance between the electrodes must be measured, the sensing instrument's excitation and readout are straightforward. The proposed sensing instrument (bottom left) is compared to a commercially accessible FSR from Interlink in Figure 6c (top left) [131]. Table 3 shows the list of a few recently proposed wearable electronic sensing instruments for different utilizations.…”