Development of printable electronic materials for low cost flexible sensor fabrication

Review on Conductive Polymer/CNTs Nanocomposites Based Flexible and Stretchable Strain and Pressure Sensors

“…The sensor layer is cured in the oven at 80 °C for 2 h to bonding it to the underlying electrodes. A similar research is presented by Sethumadhavan et al [ 103 ] where both the underlying electrode structure and the sensitive composite layer are fabricated by screen printing technique. A 125 µm PET is used as the substrate to screen print interdigital electrode structures using a mesh with thread diameter of 48 µm.…”

“…A notable advantage of using CNTs as nanofillers is the higher aspect ratios of CNTs enabling to obtain the percolation threshold at much lower concentrations which can be observed in Figure 10 a. In addition to this the quality and method of dispersing CNTs in polymer matrix also greatly alters the percolation point, facilitating conductivity at a significantly lower concentration of 0.75 wt.% [ 103 ] compared to the reported 7 wt.% [ 13 ]. The same investigation can be applied for piezocapacitive pressure sensors to determine the optimum pressure performance of the sensor.…”

“…As the conductive sensing layer is the key for such sensor structures, optimizing the material composition of the conductive layer can unveil pressure sensitivity in further higher-pressure ranges. Research has proven that even with this promising technology the choice of nanofiller is crucial to design the pressure sensitivity, as it could cost a significantly higher concentration of nanofiller to obtain measurable conductivity thus resulting in a poor sensitivity to pressure [ 103 ]. However, CNTs as a nanofiller material has proven its potential in both establishing a good conductivity at significantly lower concentrations and enhancing the sensitivity and the pressure range.…”

Aerosol jet printed capacitive strain gauge for soft structural materials

“…In addition, device designs are no longer material or geometry limited as AJP introduces the ability to print on a variety of substrates/surfaces, and provides a wide range of feature sizes that span 10 µm to 5 mm [24][25][26][27] . With the ability to achieve higher print resolutions, AJP has the potential to enhance device sensitivity by maximizing the design space of structural health monitoring systems, and provides a low-cost option for sensor fabrication [28][29][30] .…”