Development of Flexible Polymer Nanocomposite based Piezoresistive Strain Sensor
ABSTRACT :
Sensors play a crucial role in design and development of smart electronic devices. In particular flexible strain sensor demands are enormously increasing in the last decade due to the emergence of new fields such as wearable devices, bio-functional prosthetics, electronic skins. These emerging applications demand sensors with different features like flexibility, waterproof, robustness along with high performance unlike the commercially available metallic strain gauge which has less gauge factor (~2). To design such sensors, polymer nanocomposite is one of the ideal solutions. The performance of the polymer nanocomposite based flexible strain sensor depends upon many parameters such as nanofiller’s dispersion, conductivity and volume fraction in the polymer matrix. Among these, dispersion of nanofillers is a key parameter which influence rest of the parameters and it is challenging task to achieve the stable dispersion of nanofillers in the polymer matrix. In the present work, it is proposed to explore the efficient way of achieving the stable dispersion of nanofillers in the polymer matrix and study its effects on the electrical conductivity and gauge factor of the flexible strain sensors.​