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Highly flexible and sensitive wearable strain and pressure sensor based on porous graphene paper for human motion

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Abstract

The demand for high-performance multifunctional wearable devices drives the rapid development of sensors with flexibility, sensitivity and easy preparation. Here, we report an efficient preparation method to fabricate a wearable strain and pressure sensor based on porous graphene paper (PGP), which is prepared by polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) microsphere as a template. The prepared PGP-based strain and pressure sensor can detect multi-dimensional deformation and shows good flexibility even after more than 1000 s of repeated deformation cycles, while the rapid response time can be up to approximately 60 ms. Moreover, the obtained PGP-based sensor exhibits a good sensitivity that the gauge factor (GF) is up to 77 when the strain is in the range of 4–8%, much higher than other graphene materials. Importantly, the porous microstructure created by the PMMA microsphere in the PGP plays a vital role in the good comprehensive performance of the PGP-based sensor. The device shows potential applications in smart wearable devices to detect or monitor the posture and movement information of human beings.

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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61774084), by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, by the special fund of Jiangsu Province for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements (BA2019047), the open project of Key Laboratory of Materials Preparation and Protection for Harsh Environment, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (XCA20013-3), and by funding of Jiangsu Innovation Program for Graduate Education (KYCX19_0175).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Materials Science and Technology, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Materials and Technology for Energy Conversion, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, People’s Republic of China

    Yan Yang, Honglie Shen, Zhiyan Yang, Jiale Yang, Zehui Wang & Kai Gao

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  1. Yan Yang
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  2. Honglie Shen
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  3. Zhiyan Yang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by YY, HS, ZY, JY, ZW, and KG. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yan Yang and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Honglie Shen.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Yang, Y., Shen, H., Yang, Z. et al. Highly flexible and sensitive wearable strain and pressure sensor based on porous graphene paper for human motion. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 33, 17637–17648 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-022-08627-6

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