Self-healable Silver Nanowire-Based Composite for Elastic Strain Sensor

Stretchable and flexible sensors attract increasing interest due to their potential applications such as healthcare monitoring, wearable displays, and electronic skins. In these advanced application, high sensitivity, low detection limit, and conductive stability are essential features. Besides, the service life is also one of the important indicators, prolonged service life can greatly cut the cost. Self-healing can help materials recover its integrity in time after damage, which is an effective way to extend service life, thereby reducing costs and improving real engineering applications. In this work, a self-healable, stretchable and sensitive strain sensor based on the nanocomposite of AgNWs and polyurethane (PU) in the configuration of sandwich structure (AgNWs thin film was embedded between two layers of PU) was fabricated via vacuum filtration and transferring process. The as-prepared PU–AgNWs–PU sandwich structural composite showed a high gauge factors of 15 at the strain range of more than 11%. More importantly, the composite could be efficiently repaired by simply thermal treatment after damaged. All the results indicated that the as-fabricated PU–AgNWs–PU sandwich structural composites exhibited great potential applications as smart material for elastic strain sensor.