Piezoresistive Sensor Containing Lamellar MXene-Plant Fiber Sponge Obtained with Aqueous MXene Ink
Tingjie Chen, Zhiyong Liu, Gang Zhao, Zipeng Qin, Peitao Zheng, John Tosin Aladejana, Zhendong Tang, Mingcen Weng, Xiangfang Peng, Jian Chang
Abstract
Sustainable biomass materials are promising for low-cost wearable piezoresistive pressure sensors, but these devices are still produced with time-consuming manufacturing processes and normally display low sensitivity and poor mechanical stability at low-pressure regimes. Here, an aqueous MXene ink obtained by simply ball-milling is developed as a conductive modifier to fabricate the multiresponsive bidirectional bending actuator and compressible MXene-plant fiber sponge (MX-PFS) for durable and wearable pressure sensors. The MX-PFS is fabricated by physically foaming MXene ink and plant fibers. It possesses a lamellar porous structure composed of one-dimensional (1D) MXene-coated plant fibers and two-dimensional (2D) MXene nanosheets, which significantly improves the compression capacity and elasticity. Consequently, the encapsulated piezoresistive sensor (PRS) exhibits large compressible strain (60%), excellent mechanical durability (10 000 cycles), low detection limit (20 Pa), high sensitivity (435.06 kPa–1), and rapid response time (40 ms) for practical wearable applications.