Development of nanomaterials incorporated PDMS based smart materials for flexible and wearable sensors

Abstract

newline The recent electronic sensor technology demands the use of materials that are lightweight, newlinemechanically flexible, and stretchable, and cost-effective. Polymer-based composites newlineproduced by reinforcing hybrid nanomaterials meet the demands for such applications owing newlineto their excellent electrical properties, lightweight, flexible and stretchable nature. Therefore, newlinepolymer and nanomaterials-based flexible composites have been emerging as new generation newlinesmart materials and immensely studied for applications such as wearable electronic devices, newlinesupercapacitors, flexible display, touch screen, human health monitoring, human motion newlinedetection, facial recognition, and human-machine interfaces, etc. In this work, the fabrication newlineand testing of nanomaterials incorporating poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS)-based flexible newlinecomposites and sandwich structures for flexible and wearable sensors are demonstrated. Two newlinedifferent approaches were adopted to fabricate PDMS-based flexible materials. The first one newlineis the fabrication of PDMS-based composite materials by incorporating different wt% of newlinenanomaterials in the PDMS polymer matrix by using a simple solution mixing process. The newlinesecond one is the fabrication of a sandwich structure of PDMS/nanomaterials coated newlineparafilm/PDMS by a simple cost-effective method. For this purpose, firstly, different newlinenanomaterials such as GO, rGO, AgNPs, Ag_rGO, Ag_SWCNT, and Ag_MWCNT were newlinesynthesized and used. The morphology of the synthesized nanomaterials was studied by using newlineFESEM and TEM. The structural analysis of the nanomaterials and PDMS composites was newlinecarried out by XRD, FTIR, and Raman spectroscopy. Secondly, the dielectric properties of newlinethe PDMS composites were investigated and it was found that the dielectric properties were newlineimproved due to the incorporation of nanomaterials in the polymer matrix. The dielectric newlineproperties of the PDMS composites increase with the increase in wt% of the nanomaterials in newlinethe lower frequency region (1Hz). The AgNPs played a major role to improve the d