Channel Crack-Designed Gold@PU Sponge for Highly Elastic Piezoresistive Sensor with Excellent Detectability

Yun-hui Wu, Hai-zhou Liu, Song Chen, Xuchu Dong, Ping-ping Wang, Shuqi Liu, Yong Lin, Yong Wei, and Lan Liu*

Abstract

It is a great challenge to fabricate piezoresistive sensors that possess high elasticity, large-area compliance and excellent detectability to satisfy both extremely tiny and large human activities monitoring. Herein, a novel and facile strategy is reported to manufacture highly elastic channel crack-based gold@PU sponge piezoresistive material. The elastic 3D conductive network is successfully prepared by gold ion sputtering, and channel cracks are skillfully designed on the 3D sponge skeletons. Such novel structure makes these fabricated sensors are capable of monitoring both tiny and large human motions, which originate from the nano-crack joint sensing mechanism and physical contact of conductive interconnected network. Meanwhile, our sensors possess excellent elasticity, fast response time (9 ms) and ultralow detection limit (0.568 Pa), as well as good reproducibility over 1000 cycles. The desirable elasticity of channel crack-based gold@PU sensor is comparable to recently reported pressure sensors, together with advantages of reliable fabrication and large-area compliance, makes them attractive in various electronic devices, for examples, biological health monitoring, sport performance monitoring and man-machine interfaces.

You can get the article from:http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.7b04605