Fabrication of a Flexible Capacitive Pressure Sensor Using Full Inkjet Printing

Abstract

Inkjet printing has emerged as a powerful method to fabricate two- and three-dimensional structures. Full printing, as a type of inkjet printing, has the unique advantage that all the components of the device can be manufactured by printing. In this study, we use an inkjet printing system to fabricate whole flexible electronic devices. A flexible capacitive pressure sensor was firstly fabricated by a full-printing method and its pressure detection performance was experimentally proved. A capacitive-pressure-sensor array was then fabricated to demonstrate its ability to detect spatial pressure distribution. The experimental results showed that the developed sensors had good prospects in practical applications. We believe that the flexible sensors designed here could be applied in flexible wearable devices and soft robots.