Compressible, reliable, and flexible pressure sensor based on carbonized melamine foam capped by Ti₃C₂T_x MXene for versatile applications

Abstract

Abstract Flexible pressure sensors with excellent sensing properties have caused widespread concern due to their various potential applications in personalized healthcare monitoring, disease diagnosis and human-machine interaction. However, the challenge remains to simultaneously achieve high sensitivity and low fabrication cost. Herein, a compressible, reliable and flexible piezoresistive pressure sensor of Ti 3 C 2 T x MXene/carbonized melamine foam (MXene@CMF) was fabricated by coating two-dimensional (2D) Ti 3 C 2 T x MXene on the skeleton of carbonized melamine foam. Owing to the synergic effect of carbonized melamine foam and Ti 3 C 2 T x MXene, the as-prepared MXene@CMF shows excellent performance in terms of high sensitivity (similar to 0.166 kPa −1 ), fast response time (similar to 120 ms), subtle pressure detection limit of 9.6 Pa, and excellent cyclic stability. Benefiting from these excellent sensing capabilities, the applications of the sensor for artery pulse detection and bending joint monitoring are demonstrated. Moreover, with the assistance of the convolutional neural network, the proposed sensor can realize the exquisite identification of letter strokes with an average recognition accuracy of 96.3%. Based on the merit of high sensing performance and versatile application prospects, our proposed sensor may have great potential in medical and healthcare, human motion detection, handwriting verification, and anticounterfeiting applications.