Printable nanotube motion sensors promise more affordable wearables
The flexible, low-profile sensors were developed using a low-cost printing technology and can sense tensile and compressive strains as low as 0.005% and as high as 1%. According to the researchers, they represent a marked improvement over current industry standards, with most such devices being either too crude or too inflexible to reliably monitor complex structures like the human body.
“Current technology is not designed for that,” says Richard Liang, director of the High-Performance Materials Institute and professor at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. “For sensor technology, you need it to be flexible, you need it to be affordable and you need it to be scalable. This new technology is versatile and the sensors are affordable to print. It’s a big innovation that presents many possibilities down the road.”
For example, say the researchers, their low-profile design could be integrated into bedsheets to monitor quality of sleep, or shoes to track step count and posture, or workout clothes to measure the intensity of exercise. Other potential applications include soft robotics, where the material could be used to advance the production of responsive, self-correcting artificial muscles.
“Most projects don’t have this many possible applications,” says doctoral candidate Joshua DeGraff, the lead author of a study on the sensors. “This material could be used in structural health monitoring, wearable technology and everything in between. I’m excited because this is something that can affect a lot of people in their everyday lives.”
The new sensors are made from a strip of seven micron-thin buckypaper with silver ink electrodes printed from a commercially available ink-jet printer. According to the researchers, they are more sensitive than common, flexible metallic sensors, and less rigid or cumbersome than popular, more sensitive semiconductor sensors – i.e., they’re flexible, seamless, and sensitive to subtle movements and strains.
“We measure sensors by gauge factor, which indicates how much resistance value changes as a material is strained or bent,” says DeGraff. “Our gauge factor has been up to eight times higher than commercial sensors and 75% higher than many other carbon nanotube sensors.”
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to improve on the thinness of the material further so that it can be integrated into comfortable and non-restrictive clothing. The also plan on additional testing on complex model structures to ensure the material’s ability to conform to the variable curves and crevices of the human body.
For more, see “Printable low-cost and flexible carbon nanotube buckypaper motion sensors.”
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