Development of flexible piezoresistive pressure sensors based on ionic membrane

Abstract

The flexible piezoresistive sensing membrane has the tremendous opportunity in wearable and foldable devices for healthcare detection, artificial skin, human body motion, and robotics applications. The aim of this paper was to develop the polymer based piezoresistive membrane using cast solution. Poly (4-styrenesulfonic) (PSSA) were mixed with Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) polymer by using Deionized water(DW) as a solvent, to make a series of flexible piezoresistive membranes out of PVA/PSSA and investigate their electrical characteristics across a frequency range of 20 Hz to 10 MHz. The results show that raising the concentration of PSSA from 0.2gm to 0.8gm increases the dielectric constant, conductivity, and gauge factor from 105 to 107, 10-3 s/cm to 0.1 s/cm and 2.794 to 5.092 respectively, in the proposed PVA/PSSA piezoresistive ionic membrane. The electrical properties of piezoresistive ionic membranes were analyzed using the impedance analyzer for the varying wt% of PSSA. When the wt% of PSSA was varied, it was discovered that the composition containing 0.8 gm of PSSA in PVA/PSSA based ionic membrane produces the greatest results in terms of high sensitivity and gauge factor for piezoresistive sensing applications.