Porous Elastomer based Soft Pressure Sensor for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

This work presents a soft capacitive pressure sensor fabricated by sandwiching a porous elastomeric dielectric layer between two electrodes on flexible polyimide (Kapton) substrate. The fabricated sensor was tested over a wide pressure sensing range (0-300 kPa), similar to pressures experienced up to approx. 30m below the sea level. In this range, the sensor presented a near-linear response (94.5%) and a sensitivity of 0.0007 kPa <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−1</sup> . The sensor also featured fast response and recovery times (0.8 s and 1.2 s, respectively), as well as good repeatability and stability - thus proving its applicability for a wide range of pressure sensing applications, particularly underwater robotics for real-time monitoring and surveillance operations.