A highly sensitive flexible pressure sensor based on multi-scale structure and silver nanowires

With the continuous development of industry 4.0, the status of high-performance flexible sensor becomes more and more prominent, which plays an important role in a variety of advanced technologies, such as electronic skins, human-machine interfaces, biomedical diagnostics and soft robotics. To realize industrial applications of the flexible pressure sensor, it needs to have high sensitivity, short response time, low detection limit and high cycle stability. Generally speaking, pressure sensors can be divided into piezoelectric sensors, capacitive sensors and resistive sensors. Due to its ease of preparation, excellent performance and high stability, flexible electrodes with microstructures have been widely used in pressure sensors. In this paper, a simple tensile-oxidation-recovery method is used to obtain the elastomeric electrode with multi-scale structure. The pressure sensor exhibits high sensitivity, fast response and relaxation time, and high cycle stability. In addition, a pressure sensor with a multi-scale structure exhibits pretty high bending stability, high cycle stability (>1000 times), small hysteresis and fast response (<;100ms). Flexible resistive pressure sensor with low cost manufacturing and outstanding performance will be widely used in electronic skin, man-machine interface, biomedical diagnosis, soft robot and other potential applications.