Self-powered ultrasensitive and highly stretchable temperature–strain sensing composite yarns

Kening Wan; Yi Liu; Giovanni Santagiuliana; Giandrin Barandun; Prospero Taroni Junior; Firat Güder; Cees WM Bastiaansen; Mark Baxendale; Oliver Fenwick; Dimitrios G. Papageorgiou; Steffi Krause; Han Zhang; Emiliano Bilotti

doi:10.1039/D1MH00908G

Self-powered ultrasensitive and highly stretchable temperature–strain sensing composite yarns†

Kening Wan,

^a Yi Liu,

^b Giovanni Santagiuliana,

^ac Giandrin Barandun,

^d Prospero Taroni Junior,

^e Firat Güder,

^d Cees WM Bastiaansen,

^af Mark Baxendale,

^g Oliver Fenwick,

^a Dimitrios G. Papageorgiou,

^a Steffi Krause,

^a Han Zhang

^ac and Emiliano Bilotti

*^ac

Author affiliations

* Corresponding authors

^a School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, UK
E-mail: e.bilotti@qmul.ac.uk

^b Department of Materials, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

^c Nanoforce Technology Ltd., Joseph Priestley Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, UK

^d Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK

^e Institute for Materials Discovery, University College London, Malet Place, London WC1E 7JE, UK

^f Laboratory of Functional Organic Materials and Devices, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

^g School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, UK

Abstract

With the emergence of stretchable/wearable devices, functions, such as sensing, energy storage/harvesting, and electrical conduction, should ideally be carried out by a single material, while retaining its ability to withstand large elastic deformations, to create compact, functionally-integrated and autonomous systems. A new class of trimodal, stretchable yarn-based transducer formed by coating commercially available Lycra® yarns with PEDOT:PSS is presented. The material developed can sense strain (first mode), and temperature (second mode) and can power itself thermoelectrically (third mode), eliminating the need for an external power-supply. The yarns were extensively characterized and obtained an ultrahigh (gauge factor ∼3.6 × 10⁵, at 10–20% strain) and tunable (up to about 2 orders of magnitude) strain sensitivity together with a very high strain-at-break point (up to ∼1000%). These PEDOT:PSS-Lycra yarns also exhibited stable thermoelectric behavior (Seebeck coefficient of 15 μV K⁻¹), which was exploited both for temperature sensing and self-powering (∼0.5 μW, for a 10-couple module at ΔT ∼ 95 K). The produced material has potential to be interfaced with microcontroller-based systems to create internet-enabled, internet-of-things type devices in a variety of form factors.

Materials Horizons

Self-powered ultrasensitive and highly stretchable temperature–strain sensing composite yarns†

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Self-powered ultrasensitive and highly stretchable temperature–strain sensing composite yarns

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