ABSTRACT
Recent developments in electronics and smart materials allow the design of small size, flexible, lightweight and low-cost devices that are widely used as health monitoring devices, which are based on flexible and wearable sensor technologies that offer precise and efficient health monitoring of humans for better life prospects. This paper demonstrates an innovative approach to the design and simulation of flexible and self-powered pressure sensors for biomedical applications using piezoelectric material and also analyzes the sensing performance of it. The structure of this flexible pressure sensor is designed using a piezoelectric material based layer that is sandwiched between electrodes. PVDF (Polyvinylidene fluoride) is a piezoelectric polymer that is exploited as piezoelectric material for sensing layer in the proposed sensor. Due to the piezoelectric polymer-based sensing layer, this sensor is more flexible, self-powered, lightweight and cost-effective. This proposed sensor induces a self-sensing voltage when it sense a pressure, thus this sensor measures the applied pressure as induces electrical voltage. The 290 simulation of the proposed design shows the linear characteristic response and good sensitivity. The proposed device was designed with different thicknesses (40 µm, 60 µm, 80 µm, and 100 µm) and cross-sectional areas (0.06, 0.12, and 0.18) of the sensing layer, and simulation analysis revealed that altering the dimensions (thickness and cross-sectional area) of the sensing layer improved sensor sensitivity. The proposed pressure sensor using piezoelectric polymer is designed and optimized by COMSOL Multiphysics.
