Controllable fabrication of carbon nanotube-polymer hybrid thin film for strain sensing

A strain sensing material based on carbon nanotubes-polymer hybrid him has been fabricated by the vacuum filtration and poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) molding transfer methods. The density and thickness of the film is tuned by simply controlling the volume of dilute suspension filtered through the membrane. These composites are resilient under large strain and there is a wide linear range of resistance-strain dependence. We demonstrate that the thin films with thicker CNTs networks exhibit more significant resistance-strain sensitivity under the same stain and the strain sensing material shows reproducible resistance-strain sensitivity depending only on the initial CNTs suspension volume. It may be possible to fabricate strain sensing material in large volume for future smart device applications. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.