Self-powered Flexible Strain Sensor with Graphene/P(VDF-TrFE) Heterojunction

The world of wearable technology is making use of strain sensors in human monitoring, and the use of data can range from improving the lifestyle to improving safety in the workplace, i.e. smart monitoring systems, wearable biomedical health care, and real-time gait analysis [1]–[3]. Long-term stability, fast response time, self-powered operation, low cost and simplicity of the fabrication process are the preferred attributes in piezoresistive based strain sensors. In this work, we have simply fabricated a self-powered flexible strain sensor with graphene/P(VDF - TrFE) heterojunction on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. The graphene/P(VDF - TrFE) heterojunction makes the sensor a good candidate for a piezoresistive based strain sensor due to the unique properties of graphene such as high carrier mobility, mechanical strength flexibility, and tunable Fermi level based on surface charge.