Direct fabrication of high-performance multi-response e-skin based on a graphene nanosheet film

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of wearable devices, lightweight electronic skin (e-skin) has attracted significant attention. However, current fabrication technologies make it difficult to directly fabricate sensing materials on flexible substrates at low temperatures. Hence, we propose a flexible graphene nanosheet-embedded carbon (F-GNEC) film, which is directly grown on a flexible substrate using an electron cyclotron resonance low-temperature sputtering system. The direct batch manufacturing of e-skin is obtained by the unique plasma generation mode of electron cyclotron resonance and the polariton energy transfer mode between the plasma and substrate surface. The F-GNEC film contains a large number of graphene nanosheets grown vertically and the graphene edges can serve as electron capture centers, thereby enabling the multi-response properties. We achieve a high gauge factor of 14,699 under a tensile strain of ε = 0.5% and the changing rate of the resistance reaches to 113.2% when the e-skin is bent to 120°. Furthermore, the e-skin achieves a photocurrent of 1.2 μA under 532 nm laser illumination. The F-GNEC film exhibits a sensitive temperature response and achieves a coefficient of -0.58%/°C in a wide temperature range (30-100 °C). The directly fabricated F-GNEC film-based e-skin is stable and firm and exhibits multi-response detection capabilities, which enable its potential application in virtual reality technology and flexible robots.