Yin Yunjiang, Zhao Yingying, Xue Tao, Wang Xinyi, Zou Qiang
School of Microelectronics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China.
Tianjin Flying Pigeon Group Co., Ltd., Tianjin 301600, China.
Micromachines (Basel). 2025 Apr 13;16(4):461. doi: 10.3390/mi16040461.
Flexible piezoresistive pressure sensors have great potential in wearable electronics due to their simple structure, low cost, and ease of fabrication. Porous polymer materials, with their highly deformable internal pores, effectively expand the sensing range. However, a single-sized pore structure struggles to achieve both high sensitivity and a broad sensing range simultaneously. In this study, a PDMS-based flexible pressure sensor with a bilayer porous structure (BLPS) was successfully fabricated using clamping compression and a sacrificial template method with spherical sucrose cores. The resulting sensor exhibits highly uniform pore sizes, thereby improving performance consistency. Furthermore, since different pore sizes and thicknesses correspond to varying Young's moduli, this study achieves tunable sensitivity across a wide pressure range by adjusting the bilayer thickness ratio (maximum sensitivity of 0.063 kPa-1 in the 0-23.6 kPa range, with a pressure response range of 0-654 kPa). The sensor also demonstrates a fast response time (128 ms) and excellent fatigue stability (>10,000 cycles). Additionally, this sensor holds great application potential for facial expression monitoring, joint motion detection, pressure distribution matrices, and Morse code communication.
柔性压阻式压力传感器因其结构简单、成本低且易于制造，在可穿戴电子设备中具有巨大潜力。多孔聚合物材料因其内部孔隙具有高度可变形性，有效扩展了传感范围。然而，单一尺寸的孔结构难以同时实现高灵敏度和宽传感范围。在本研究中，采用夹紧压缩和以球形蔗糖颗粒为牺牲模板的方法，成功制备了一种具有双层多孔结构（BLPS）的基于聚二甲基硅氧烷（PDMS）的柔性压力传感器。所得传感器呈现出高度均匀的孔径，从而提高了性能一致性。此外，由于不同的孔径和厚度对应不同的杨氏模量，本研究通过调整双层厚度比，在很宽的压力范围内实现了可调灵敏度（在0 - 23.6 kPa范围内最大灵敏度为0.063 kPa-1，压力响应范围为0 - 654 kPa）。该传感器还具有快速的响应时间（128 ms）和出色的疲劳稳定性（>10,000次循环）。此外，这种传感器在面部表情监测、关节运动检测、压力分布矩阵和摩尔斯电码通信方面具有巨大的应用潜力。
