MXene Reinforced PAA/PEDOT:PSS/MXene Conductive Hydrogel for Highly Sensitive Strain Sensors

Conductive hydrogel has a vital application prospect in flexible electronic fields such as electronic skin and force sensors. Developing conductive hydrogel with significant toughness and high sensitivity is urgently needed for application research. In this work, a strong and sensitive strain sensor based on conductive hydrogel is demonstrated by introducing MXene (Ti3C2Tx) into the micelle crosslinked polyacrylic acid (PAA)/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene-sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) hydrogel network. The functional polymer micelle crosslinkers can dissipate external stress by deformation, endowing the hydrogel with high strength. The combination of MXene both improves the polymer network structure and the conductive pathways, further enhancing the mechanical properties and sensing performance. Resultantly, the flexible strain sensor base on PAA/PEDOT:PSS/MXene conductive hydrogel exhibits excellent sensing performance with a high gauge factor of 20.86, a large strain detection range of 1000%, as well as good adhesion on different interfaces. Thus, it can be used to monitor various movements of the human body and identify all kinds of handwriting, showing great potential into wearable electronics.