Highly Sensitive Multifilament Fiber Strain Sensors with Ultrabroad Sensing Range for Textile Electronics.

TLDR: This work presents a facile approach for fabricating highly stretchable and sensitive fiber strain sensors by embedding Ag nanoparticles into a stretchable fiber with a multifilament structure to demonstrate the potential of the Fiber strain sensors as candidates for electronic textiles, wearable electronics, and biomedical engineering.

Abstract: Highly stretchable fiber strain sensors are one of the most important components for various applications in wearable electronics, electronic textiles, and biomedical electronics. Herein, we present a facile approach for fabricating highly stretchable and sensitive fiber strain sensors by embedding Ag nanoparticles into a stretchable fiber with a multifilament structure. The multifilament structure and Ag-rich shells of the fiber strain sensor enable the sensor to simultaneously achieve both a high sensitivity and largely wide sensing range despite its simple fabrication process and components. The fiber strain sensor simultaneously exhibits ultrahigh gauge factors (∼9.3 × 105 and ∼659 in the first stretching and subsequent stretching, respectively), a very broad strain-sensing range (450 and 200% for the first and subsequent stretching, respectively), and high durability for more than 10 000 stretching cycles. The fiber strain sensors can also be readily integrated into a glove to control a hand robot an...