Highly Stretchable and Sensitive Strain Sensor Based on Silver Nanowire–Elastomer Nanocomposite

TLDR

The growing demand for flexible and wearable electronics has driven interest in sensors that can be easily mounted on clothing or directly onto the body, especially highly stretchable and sensitive strain sensors for human motion detection. This work reports highly flexible, stretchable, and sensitive strain sensors based on a silver nanowire network embedded in a PDMS elastomer sandwich structure. The sensors are fabricated by embedding a thin film of silver nanowires between two layers of PDMS to form a nanocomposite. The resulting nanocomposite sensors exhibit strong piezoresistivity with gauge factors ranging from 2 to 14, stretchability up to 70%, and were successfully integrated into a glove with five sensors to detect finger motion and control a virtual avatar.

Abstract

The demand for flexible and wearable electronic devices is increasing due to their facile interaction with human body. Flexible, stretchable and wearable sensors can be easily mounted on clothing or directly attached onto the body. Especially, highly stretchable and sensitive strain sensors are needed for the human motion detection. Here, we report highly flexible, stretchable and sensitive strain sensors based on the nanocomposite of silver nanowire (AgNW) network and PDMS elastomer in the form of the sandwich structure (i.e., AgNW thin film embedded between two layers of PDMS). The AgNW network-elastomer nanocomposite based strain sensors show strong piezoresistivity with tunable gauge factors in the ranges of 2 to 14 and a high stretchability up to 70%. We demonstrate the applicability of our high performance strain sensors by fabricating a glove integrated with five strain sensors for the motion detection of fingers and control of an avatar in the virtual environment.