Study on the construction of dual-structured flexible pressure sensor based on breath figure process

TL;DR: Researchers developed a flexible pressure sensor with high sensitivity (0.054 kPa−1) using a novel breath figure process, creating a dual-structured sensor with porous dielectric and electrode layers, enhancing its performance in wearable electronics and human-machine interfaces.

Abstract: Flexible pressure sensors (FPS) are of high research value due to their potential in wearable electronics and human-machine interfaces. In this work, strategy of making structured FPS with dielectric elastomer and polymeric electrode layer both endowed with surface pore array was reported. Novel procedure based on the breath figure (BF) process, including solvent-free BF pore-formation upon polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) via temperature-controlling and post-treatment BF pore-formation upon polylactic acid via solvent spraying, was implemented to fabricate porous dielectric and electrode layer, respectively. Influencing factors of PDMS pore-formation, including temperature, environmental humidity and weight ratio of crosslinker, were tuned to investigate the formation mechanism as well as manipulate the obtained structure. After the assembly of the porous dielectric and electrode layer, the obtained dual-structured FPS showed much higher sensitivity, as high as 0.054 kPa−1, compared to the one without pores. This is the first report on the preparation of dual-structured FPS based on BF process.