Electronic Skin from High-Throughput Fabrication of Intrinsically Stretchable Lead Zirconate Titanate Elastomer

Yiming Liu; Huanxi Zheng; Ling Zhao; Shiyuan Liu; Kuanming Yao; Dengfeng Li; Chunki Yiu; Shenghan Gao; Raudel Avila; Chirarattananon Pakpong; Lingqian Chang; Zuankai Wang; Xian Huang; Zhaoqian Xie; Zhengbao Yang; Xinge Yu

doi:10.34133/2020/1085417

Electronic Skin from High-Throughput Fabrication of Intrinsically Stretchable Lead Zirconate Titanate Elastomer

Research (Wash D C). 2020 Oct 17:2020:1085417. doi: 10.34133/2020/1085417. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China.
³ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300000, China.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
⁵ School of Biology Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
⁶ State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis for Industrial Equipment, Department of Engineering Mechanics, International Research Center for Computational Mechanics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China.

Abstract

Electronic skin made of thin, soft, stretchable devices that can mimic the human skin and reconstruct the tactile sensation and perception offers great opportunities for prosthesis sensing, robotics controlling, and human-machine interfaces. Advanced materials and mechanics engineering of thin film devices has proven to be an efficient route to enable and enhance flexibility and stretchability of various electronic skins; however, the density of devices is still low owing to the limitation in existing fabrication techniques. Here, we report a high-throughput one-step process to fabricate large tactile sensing arrays with a sensor density of 25 sensors/cm² for electronic skin, where the sensors are based on intrinsically stretchable piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) elastomer. The PZT elastomer sensor arrays with great uniformity and passive-driven manner enable high-resolution tactile sensing, simplify the data acquisition process, and lower the manufacturing cost. The high-throughput fabrication process provides a general platform for integrating intrinsically stretchable materials into large area, high device density soft electronics for the next-generation electronic skin.