Scalable fabrication of nanomaterial integrated polymer fibers as self-powered sensors

Abstract

Wearable electronics have great potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling real-time data acquisition and transfer. Textiles, a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, get exposed to a vast amount of biomarkers to provide information on health status and the onset of diseases without compromising comfort. Self-powered sensors have gained interest as these devices do not require any external power to operate but rather can harvest energy to operate the low-power elec-tronics. However, textile-based sensor fabrication requires complex multi-step fabrication protocols. In this study, a one-step fabrication of functional fibers for self-powered sensing using thermal drawing process was investigated. Inte-gration of 2D nanomaterials have significantly improved the performance of the fluoropolymer (PVDF) based triboelectric and piezoelectric fibers. 2D nanoma-terials enhance the output predominantly by the combined effect of interfacial polarization and microcapacitor formation. MXene-PVDF nanocomposite fiber shows β phase increases consistently up to 44% upon 5 wt% MXene addition. The triboelectric fiber demonstrates the capability to harvest energy and biomotion monitoring such as gait analysis. The structural design of MoS2-PVDF piezoelec-tric fiber ensures efficient stress transfer to the piezoelectric domain. Moreover, MoS2 addition increases up to 3 wt% with β phase amount 50% and decreases upon higher MoS2 addition. The Piezoelectric fiber demonstrates the ability to detect physiological signals such as pulse and respiration. The sensors can wirelessly transmit data to store and analyze using a microcontroller unit. The demonstration of large-scale fabrication of the self-powered fiber sensors shows the prospect of the technology as industrially translatable for developing smart clothing.