MXene-composited highly stretchable, sensitive and durable hydrogel for flexible strain sensors

The flourishing development in flexible electronics has provoked intensive research in flexible strain sensors to realize accurate perception acquisition under different external stimuli. However, building hydrogel-based strain sensors with high stretchability and sensitivity remains a great challenge. Herein, MXene nanosheets were composited into polyacrylamide-sodium alginate matrix to construct mechanical robust and sensitive double networked hydrogel strain sensor. The hydrophilic MXene nanosheets formed strong interactions with the polymer matrix and endowed the hydrogel with excellent tensile properties (3150%), compliant mechanical strength (2.03 kPa⁻¹ in Young's Module) and long-lasting stability and fatigue resistance (1000 dynamic cycles under 1,600% strain). Due to the highly oriented MXene-based three dimensional conductive networks, the hydrogel sensor achieved extremely high tensile sensitivity (18.15 in gauge factor) and compression sensitivity (0.38 kPa⁻¹ below 3 kPa). MXene hydrogel-based strain sensors also displayed negligible hysteresis in electromechanical performance, typical frequent-independent feature and rapid response time to external stimuli. Moreover, the sensor exhibited accurate response to different scales of human movements, providing potential application in speech recognition, expression recognition and handwriting verification.