Sensors - New Materials Issue #38

The Israeli company develops kinetic energy harvesters that enable high energy efficiency for the operation of wireless sensors and IoT devices

Machines can talk. In their unique mixed language of vibration, temperature and electrical signals, motors, compressors, pumps, and gearboxes can reveal insights about their instantaneous state and…

EPFL researchers have discovered that gadolinium-doped cerium oxide, a compound they created in the lab, could be a promising alternative to certain piezoelectric materials: it has the same proprieties yet may be 100 times more effective. It’s also lead-free, unlike the best piezoelectric materials, which means that it could be employed in bio-compatible medical applications. Further research will be conducted on this highly promising compound and similar materials.

In industry, people work with robots. While this can accelerate productivity, it does come with health and safety risks. As a result, some robots must be kept separate from human workers. This comes at a heavy financial cost …

The simplest and most traditional business model for a hardware product is as follows: You sell it for more money than it cost you to make. But is that the only way? What happens when you add software to the product?

In this work we present a facile method for the fabrication of several capacitive transduction electrodes for sensing applications. To prepare the electrodes, line widths up to 300  $$\upmu$$ m were produced on polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) substrate using a common workshop laser engraving machine. The geometries prepared with the laser ablation process were characterised by optical microscopy for consistency and accuracy. Later, the geometries were coated with functional polymer porous cellulose decorated sensing layer for humidity sensing. The resulting sensors were tested at various relative humidity (RH) levels. In general, good sensing response was produced by the sensors with sensitivities ranging from 0.13 to 2.37 pF/%RH. In ambient conditions the response time of 10 s was noticed for all the fabricated sensors. Moreover, experimental results show that the sensitivity of the fabricated sensors depends highly on the geometry and by changing the electrode geometry sensitivity increases up to 5 times can be achieved with the same sensing layer. The simplicity of the fabrication process and higher sensitivity resulting from the electrode designs is expected to enable the application of the proposed electrodes not only in air quality sensors but also in many other areas such as touch or tactile sensors.