Pulsed laser-assisted direct fabrication of MoWS alloy-based flexible strain sensors with superior performance for high-temperature applications.

Flexible strain sensors with high sensitivity and stability at high temperatures are significantly desirable for their accurate and long-term signal detection in wearable devices, environment monitoring, and aerospace electronics. Despite the considerable efforts in materials development and structural design, it remains a challenge to develop highly sensitive, flexible strain sensors operating at high temperatures due to the trade-off between sensitivity and stability for the representative sensing materials. Herein, we develop a high-temperature flexible sensor using MoWS alloy films. A pulsed laser is introduced to directly synthesize MoWS patterns with controllable compositions and physical parameters, enabling the realization of flexible sensors without photolithography or transfer procedures. The resultant flexible sensors exhibit a high gauge factor of 97.4, a low strain detection of 4.9 με, and strong tolerance to a temperature of 500 °C. Owing to its superior performance, we develop a wireless acoustic recognition system to distinguish tiny strain signals of tuning forks with a vibration frequency up to 128 Hz under extreme temperature conditions. The laser method for the direct fabrication of MoWS alloy-based flexible sensors holds great potential in the precise detection of strain signals from complex structures at high temperatures.