Reliability study of the three-dimensional porous flexible resistive pressure sensor

Driven by the growing demands in artificial intelligence, health detection, and human-machine interaction, flexible pressure sensors, an indispensable branch of wearable electronics, have attracted attention for their wide range of applications. The flexible pressure sensor with a three-dimensional (3D) porous conductive sponge as the sensitive layer, whose resistance value changes with external pressure stimulation, has become a cutting-edge device. However, there are still issues on the reliability of flexible porous pressure devices composed of soft matter under sustained large pressure loads. In this work, a flexible porous pressure device developed based on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)/carbon black (CB)-attached porous composite sensitive layer was fabricated. The results show that PDMS can be used as a homogeneous binder to assist CB in attaching stably to the porous framework surface, avoiding the slipping and detachment of CB under the large strain of the framework. Under continuous loadings at 1000 kPa, the PDMS/CB@PDMS device did not experience significant initial resistance drift.