Fabrication of carbon nanocoils based tactile sensor

This study investigated the high sensitivity tactile sensors which were fabricated using carbon nanocoil mats (CNCs) and PDMS (polydimethyl siloxane). Tactile sensor is the sandwiched structure that the CNCs were inserted between two PDMS layers. The sensing principle is based on the piezoresistivity effect of the CNCs. We first synthesized the CNCs using the chemical vapor deposition technique using two components of the catalyst. The yield of CNCs growth reaches 95% at the mass ratio of the catalyst Fe:Sn at 95:5. To investigate the effect of the composition ratio of carbon nanocoils and carbon fibers, the tactile sensors with different ratio of the CNC composition were fabricated for experimental comparison. It is found that the ratio of carbon fibers and carbon nanocoils in the sensor dramatically affected the sensing characterization. Finally, the tactile pressure can achieve the sensitivity of 0.99 %/KPa.