Abstract:
Being one of the key components in flexible electronics, human-computer interaction, intelligent robots, and so on, flexible pressure sensors have been highly developed in recent years. Because of their simple structure and good stability, flexible piezoresistive sensors have been widely used. However, most flexible piezoresistive sensors reported have a limited effective pressure-detection range, which restricts the integrity design of sensing system. In this paper, a flexible piezoresistive composite was produced by using the paraffin microspheres surface-coated with graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs), short carbon fibers (SCFs) and silicone rubber. Due to the temperature-dependent compressive property of paraffin and the synergistic effect of GNPs and SCFs, the composites obtained have a wide modulation range of compressive modulus from 0.64 to 0.88 MPa within the compressive strain of 0-40% under the assistance of electrical field. Therefore, the composite sensor obtained shows a wide effective pressure-detection range of 0.1-100 kPa at the frequency range of 0-2 Hz, much wider than most flexible pressure sensors reported. To be specific, the composite sensor has an effective pressure-detection range of 0.25-100 kPa, 0.15-80 kPa and 0.1-70 kPa after applying a voltage of 1 V, 10 V and 15 V, respectively. In addition to the wide pressure-detection range, the current sensor exhibits a relatively high sensing accuracy, thus showing a great potential in the fields of health monitor wearable electronic devices and intelligent robots.