Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes forest based flexible strain sensor for Internet of Things applications

In this work, we fabricated wearable strain sensors by iron-filled vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs), which would eliminate traditional nano-printing processes by directly depositing CNTs on bendable foil based substrate with Ferrocene (Fe(C
₅
H
₅
)
₂
). The fabrication provides a forward potential for large-scale industrial manufacturing and flexible electronics design. Also, the vertically-aligned features give a significant improvement on the gauge factor compared to the mixed and multiple carbon nanotube-based material, the gauge factor (367) is higher than commercial strain sensors and previous research. The VA-CNTs sensor showed a high stability in the next generation mobile computing scenario by building a portable, cheaper, and highly synchronous embedded Internet of Things (IoT)-sensing system.