Liquid metal based smart fiber sensor for human-computer interaction

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology Shenzhen, China

^* chenmingxun990405@163.com

Abstract

Flexible electronic devices based on liquid metal fibers have attracted the attention of many laboratories in the world due to their convenient use and characteristics of being able to be woven into flexible textiles or applied directly on the body surface. In this research, we utilized the liquid metal mixed with copper particles (Cu-EGaIn) as the outer conductive layer of stretchable fiber, developing a highperformance composite conductive fiber based on liquid metal. The composite conductive fiber has three layers: stretchable elastic fiber core; adhesion layer; liquid metal layer. Specifically, the stretchable elastic fiber core provides the high tensile property, the adhesion layer is used to hold the liquid metal on the fiber surface, and the liquid metal layer makes the fiber have a high electrical conductivity. This kind of fiber not only has the characteristic of high electrical conductivity of metal materials, but also can always maintain high electrical conductivity even in large-scale tensile state. Therefore, we developed a tension sensor based on liquid metal intelligent fiber for human-computer interaction.