Multifunctional and highly sensitive piezoresistive sensing textile based on a hierarchical architecture

Flexible sensing materials have attracted tremendous attention for the practical applications in humanoid robotics and wearable electronics. However, achieving flexible sensors possessing high sensitivity and multifunctionality via a facile and robust manufacturing strategy is still challenging. Herein, a scalable and efficient fabrication strategy is employed to yield conductive textile with a hierarchical architecture as high performance piezoresistive sensing element, by assembling reduced graphene oxide and polyaniline nanorod arrays onto fabric fibers in sequence (PANI/rGO/textile). The pressure sensor, which is prepared by multilayer PANI/rGO/textile, exhibits ultrahigh sensitivity (97.28 kPa−1) and linear response over a wide pressure regime (0.0005–40 kPa), excellent durability (11000 cycles), wide working bandwidth (1–10 Hz), fast response time (≈30 ms) and recovery time (≈25 ms), and low detection limit (0.5 Pa). In practical applications, the pressure sensors are used to detect various human motions. Additionally, pressure sensor arrays could successfully perceive the magnitude and spatial distribution of diverse pressure stimuli. Moreover, the PANI/rGO/textile can be used for strain sensor directly, confirming a negative resistance variation and anisotropic strain response behavior. The strain sensor exhibits a high negative sensitivity (−78) and excellent durability (1000 cycles), which could be woven on clothing for human activities monitoring, thereby marking a significant progress for constructing high-performance wearable electronics.