Developed ultra-thin, transparent, ultra-accurate pressure sensors

A type of transparent load cell, only 8 micrometers thick, can accurately detect pressure at 144 points at the same time even when flexing and twisting extremely hard has been successfully developed by scientists. It promises to be applied in many flexible electronic devices, wearable devices and especially in medicine, doctors will have a special glove to help detect cancer tissue simply by examinations outside the patient's body.

Although there are currently some types of pressure sensors that can be flexed, most of them lose accuracy when twisted and wrinkled. On the other hand most are very thick, about 100 micro meters. In contrast, a group of US and Japanese scientists have overcome these problems by developing a completely new type of load cell with ultra-thin properties, ensuring accurate operation even when bent in any shape.

This type of sensor will have many different applications.

According to the team, this type of sensor can accurately measure pressure even when bent into a radius of 80 micro meters, equivalent to about 2 times the width of a human hair. And more specifically, it can be combined into a series of sensors to measure the pressure on curved physical objects. The leader of the research group at Tokyo University Sungwon Lee said: "This type of sensor has great potential to be applied to flexible electronic devices and wearable devices. I have noticed that many research groups are developing colds. Flexible plastic pressure sensors measure pressure but most are not suitable because they are very sensitive to deformation, and this is the main motivation for us to find solutions. "

To develop the aforementioned plastic sensor , the group added carbon nanotubes and graphene into elastic polymers, forming nanofibers with 300 to 700 nanometers in diameter. The fibers are then woven together to form a very thin and transparent film. Next, they placed a 2-meter-thick sensor matrix into the upper film and the end result was an ultra-thin pressure sensor structure. The team shared: "In our structure, the fibers in it will change relative bonding to each other to match the overall deformation of the whole, thereby reducing the pressure that each fiber experience". Therefore, the sensor system can fully operate correctly even when bending the bend.

In terms of applications, the team thinks that this sensor will have many different applications, ranging from wearable devices, soft-body robots, medical systems, implant devices. They said: "We are testing the performance of this type of pressure sensor with an artificial blood vessel and discover that it can detect very small changes in blood flow in the circuit."