Porous fiber paper and 3D patterned electrodes composed high-sensitivity flexible piezoresistive sensor for physiological signal monitoring

The research on flexible pressure sensors has drawn widespread attention in recent years,especially in the fields of health care and intelligent robots.In practical applications,the sensitivity of sensors directly affects the precision and integrity of weak pressure signals.Here,a pressure sensor with high sensitivity and a wide measurement range composed of porous fiber paper and 3D patterned electrodes is proposed.Multi-walled carbon nanotubes with excellent conductivity were evenly sprayed on the fiber paper to form the natural spatial conducting networks,while the copper-deposited polydimethylsiloxane films with micropyramids array were used as electrodes and flexible substrates.Increased conducting paths between electrodes and fibers can be obtained when high-density micro-pyramids fall into the porous structures of the fiber paper under external pressure,thereby promoting the pressure sensor to show an ultra-high sensitivity of 17.65 kPa^(-1)in the pressure range of 0–2 kPa,16 times that of the device without patterned electrodes.Besides,the sensor retains a high sensitivity of 2.06 kPa^(-1)in an ultra-wide measurement range of 150 kPa.Moreover,the sensor can detect various physiological signals,including pulse and voice,while attached to the human skin.This work provides a novel strategy to significantly improve the sensitivity and measurement range of flexible pressure sensors,as well as demonstrates attractive applications in physiological signal monitoring.

Numerical Simulation on Thermal-Electrical Characteristics and Electrode Patterns of GaN LEDs with Graphene/NiO_x Hybrid Electrode

The thermal-electrical characteristic of a GaN light-emitting diode （LED） with the hybrid transparent conductive layers （TCLs） of graphene （Gr） and NiOx is investigated by a finite element method. It is indicated that the LED with the compound TCL of 3-layer Gr and 1 nm NiOx has the best thermal-electrical performance from the view point of the maximum temperature and the current density deviation of multiple quantum wells, and the maximum temperature occurs near the n-electrode rather than p-electrode. Furthermore, to depress the current crowding on the LED, the electrode pattern parameters including p- and n-electrode length, p-electrode buried depth and the distance of n-electrode to active area are optimized. It is found that either increasing p- or n-electrode length and buried depth or decreasing the distance of n-electrode from the active area will decrease the temperature of the LED, while the increase of the n-electrode length has more prominent effect. Typically, when the n-electrode length increases to 0.8 times of the chip size, the temperature of the GaN LED with the inm NiOx/3-1ayer-Gr hybrid TCLs could drop about 7K and the current density uniformity could increase by 23.8%, compared to 0.4 times of the chip size. This new finding will be beneficial for improvement of the thermal- electrical performance of LEDs with various conductive TCLs such as NiOx/Gr or ITO/Gr as current spreading layers.