Iron-Adjustable Compressible Elastic Chitosan-Derived\nCarbon Aerogel with Wide-Range Linear Sensitivity and Super Sensing\nPerformances for Wearable Piezoresistive Sensors

Abstract

Ultra-light\nelastic carbon aerogels with high compressibility have\nbroad application prospects in wearable devices. Especially, they\nare ideal materials for fabricating flexible piezoresistive sensors.\nIn this paper, an ultra-light carbon aerogel was successfully fabricated\nusing freeze-drying and carbonization of the solution containing chitosan\n(CS), polyimide (PI), and FeCl₃·6H₂O. Owing\nto the interplay interaction between CS and PI and the adjustment\nof the FeCl₃ concentration, this carbon aerogel with compact,\ncontinuous, ordered, layered structure shows a wide range of excellent\nsensing properties (10.28 kPa^–1 and 0–6 kPa),\nremarkable long-term stability (1000 cycles), and outstanding mechanical\nproperties (withstand up to 95% compression strain and 1000 cycles\ncompression under 50% strain without deformation). In addition, the\ncarbon aerogel can be bent to detect different angular changes. These\nadvantages mentioned above allow carbon aerogel to be wildly used\nto detect human movement and biological signals.