Highly Sensitive Broad-Range Battery-Type All-in-one Self-Powered Stretchable Pressure Sensors based on porous electrodes

Flexible wearable pressure sensors with high sensitivity and broad sensing range have promoted the vigorous development of flexible electronics. Currently, most of the self-powered flexible pressure sensors are built mainly based on piezoelectric and triboelectric types, which can usually only detect dynamic pressure. They may also be built by integrating batteries or capacitors with sensors, which results in low integration and limits the development of sensor miniaturization. Here, we report a novel battery-type all-in-one self-powered stretchable pressure sensor with porous polyurethane foam (PUF)/V2O5/polypyrrole (PPy) composite as both cathode and pressure-sensitive layer, hot-pressed porous PUF/carbon nanotube (CNT)/PPy composite as anode, and polyacrylamide (PAM) ionic gel as electrolyte. This self-powered flexible pressure sensor has an excellent sensing performance combining good cyclicity (at least 5000 cycles under 40% compressive strain), high sensitivity (141.5 kPa-1), and broad sensing range (1.8 Pa-1.5 MPa). Moreover, its response is small under 50% tensile strain, demonstrating the good stability against stretching. More importantly, this battery-type all-in-one self-powered pressure sensor can address the limitations that the current piezoelectric and triboelectric self-powered pressure sensors can usually only detect dynamic pressure. This work provides a new strategy for the design of novel next-generation all-in-one self-powered miniaturized pressure-sensitive wearable electronics.