Highly Sensitive Pseudocapacitive Iontronic Pressure Sensor with Broad Sensing Range

Flexible pressure sensors are unprecedentedly studied on monitoring human physical activities and robotics. Simultaneously, improving the response sensitivity and sensing range of flexible pressure sensors is a great challenge, which hinders the devices' practical application. Targeting this obstacle, we developed a -Ti3C2Tx-derived iontronic pressure sensor (TIPS) by taking the advantages of the high intercalation pseudocapacitance under high pressure and rationally designed structural configuration. TIPS achieved an ultrahigh sensitivity (S-min > 200 kPa(-1), S-max > 45,000 kPa(-1)) in a broad sensing range of over 1.4 MPa and low limit of detection of 20 Pa as well as stable long-term working durability for 10,000 cycles. The practical application of TIPS in physical activity monitoring and flexible robot manifested its versatile potential. This study provides a demonstration for exploring pseudocapacitive materials for building flexible iontronic sensors with ultrahigh sensitivity and sensing range to advance the development of high-performance wearable electronics.

Automated summary

The research team successfully developed an iontronic pressure sensor (TIPS) with ultrahigh sensitivity and broad sensing range, by utilizing high intercalation pseudocapacitance and a rationally designed structural configuration under high pressure. The sensor demonstrated high stability and long-term durability in practical applications.