Highly stable flexible pressure sensors with a quasi-homogeneous composition and interlinked interfaces

Yuan Zhang; Junlong Yang; Xingyu Hou; Gang Li; Liu Wang; Ningning Bai; Minkun Cai; Lingyu Zhao; Yan Wang; Jianming Zhang; Ke Chen; Xiang Wu; Canhui Yang; Yuan Dai; Zhengyou Zhang; Chuan Fei Guo

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-29093-y

Highly stable flexible pressure sensors with a quasi-homogeneous composition and interlinked interfaces

Nat Commun. 2022 Mar 10;13(1):1317. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29093-y.

Authors

Yuan Zhang^#¹, Junlong Yang^#², Xingyu Hou¹, Gang Li¹, Liu Wang¹, Ningning Bai¹, Minkun Cai¹, Lingyu Zhao¹, Yan Wang¹, Jianming Zhang¹, Ke Chen³, Xiang Wu⁴, Canhui Yang⁵, Yuan Dai³, Zhengyou Zhang³, Chuan Fei Guo^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China.
² College of Polymer Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering of China, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China.
³ Tencent Robotics X, Shenzhen, 518000, Guangdong, China.
⁴ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shenyang University of Technology, Shenyang, 110870, China.
⁵ Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China.
⁶ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China. guocf@sustech.edu.cn.
⁷ Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China. guocf@sustech.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Electronic skins (e-skins) are devices that can respond to mechanical stimuli and enable robots to perceive their surroundings. A great challenge for existing e-skins is that they may easily fail under extreme mechanical conditions due to their multilayered architecture with mechanical mismatch and weak adhesion between the interlayers. Here we report a flexible pressure sensor with tough interfaces enabled by two strategies: quasi-homogeneous composition that ensures mechanical match of interlayers, and interlinked microconed interface that results in a high interfacial toughness of 390 J·m^-2. The tough interface endows the sensor with exceptional signal stability determined by performing 100,000 cycles of rubbing, and fixing the sensor on a car tread and driving 2.6 km on an asphalt road. The topological interlinks can be further extended to soft robot-sensor integration, enabling a seamless interface between the sensor and robot for highly stable sensing performance during manipulation tasks under complicated mechanical conditions.