Woven Structure for Flexible Capacitive Pressure Sensors

Flexible and stretchable capacitive pressure sensors have been developed in recent years due to their potential applications in health monitoring, robot skins, body activity measurements and so on. In order to enhance sensor sensitivity, researchers have changed structure of the dielectric of parallel plate capacitive sensor. Here we enhance the sensor sensitivities by changing electrode composition and explore the use of a woven electrode structure sensor with silver coated nylon yarn and Ecoflex™. The woven structure enhanced sensitivity 2.3 times relative to a simple cross-grid geometry (sensitivity was 0.003 kPa -1 ). Furthermore, it is also observed that the sensor with the woven electrode also had better repeatability and showed less creep than a device using carbon black electrodes. The woven structure of the electrodes enabled the device to be compliant, despite the presence of the stiff nylon fibres–thereby enabling good sensitivity without the creep seen in softer electrodes.