UltraSensitive Flexible Pressure Sensor Based on Microstructured Electrode Flexible pressure sensors with a high sensitivity in the lower zone of a subtlepressure regime has shown great potential in the fields of electronic skin, humanxe2x80x93computer interaction, wearable devices, intelligent prosthesis, and medical health. Adding microstructures on the dielectric layer on a capacitive pressure sensor has become a common and effective approach to enhance the performance of flexible pressure sensors. Here, we propose a method to further dramatically increase the sensitivity by adding elastic pyramidal microstructures on one side of the electrode and using a thin layer of a dielectric in a capacitive sensor. The sensitivity of the proposed device has been improved from 3.1 to 70.6 kPaxe2x88x921 compared to capacitive sensors having pyramidal microstructures in the same dimension on the dielectric layer. Moreover, a detection limit of 1 Pa was achieved. The finite element analysis performed based on electromechanical sequential coupling simulation for hyperelastic materials indicates that the microstructures on electrode are critical to achieve high sensitivity. The influence of the duty ratio of the micropyramids on the sensitivity of the sensor is analyzed by both simulation and experiment. The durability and robustness of the device was also demonstrated by pressure testing for 2000 cycles.

A Flexible Tactile Sensor Array Based on Conductive Rubber In this paper, a novel flexible tactile sensor array based on conductive rubber is presented. Compared with other research results, we use the materials with complete flexibility to fabricate the soft sensors. The sensing prototype includes polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the sealing layers and conductive rubber as sensing layer. This proposed tactile sensor can measure the contact pressure under wrapping one curved surface. In our study, we developed a skinlike tactile sensor array from three aspects: design procedures, fabrication techniques and test results via taking one 8xc3x978 sensor array for example, which is a sandwich structure and the sensing material was laminated into a thin encapsulation film with 2mm in thickness. Furthermore, the sensor overcomes the fabrication complexity, chemical unsafety and environmental instability problems to some extent. In the end, the final experimental demonstration verify the feasibility of the sensor array with discrete sensing elements in measuring the tactile force via matlab.