Nanomaterial-based Flexible Tactile Sensor Array for Robotic Applications

Abstract

Robotics and artificial intelligence have gained tremendous attention in many useful applications such as human-machine interaction, healthcare, biomedicals, and electronic skin (e-skin). Flexible and smart electronics are fundamental elements for those applications. Our focus here is how to obtain a highly sensitive e-skin to mimic human skin functionality. Achieving high stretchability, sensitivity, and durability at the same time becomes the main challenge for e-skin. The project aims to develop a sensor array that can provide high sensitivity with simply prepared materials used as conductive arrays alone or as a nanocomposite. The material of interest here is metalorganic frameworks (MOFs) which are ideal sensing materials because of their promising properties including high surface area, multi-responsive property, and high porosity. Isoreticular metal-organic framework (IRMOF-1 or MOF-5) are used in this work to create triboelectric nanogenerators for energy harvesting and as a sensing device converting the mechanical stimuli into an electrical output can be measured and even stored for sensor self-powering. With a 100 µA short-circuit current and a 250 V open-circuit voltage, the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) based on MOF-5 yields an outstanding output performance. This work successfully used MOF-5 materials to improve TENG's energy harvesting performance, paving the way for a new stream of tribomaterials.

Date of Award	Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Lianxi Zheng (Supervisor)