• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.117-123
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• 2015

In order to develop stretchable substrate technology for stretchable devices, locally stiffness-variant stretchable substrates were processed with two polydimethylsiloxane elastomers of different stiffnesses and their deformation behavior was characterized. Low-stiffness substrate matrix and embedded high-stiffness island of the stretchable substrate were formed by using Dragon Skin 10 of the elastic modulus of 0.09 MPa and Sylgard 184 of the elastic modulus of 2.15 MPa, respectively. A stretchable substrate was fabricated to a configuration of 6.5 cm length, 0.4 cm thickness, and 2.5 cm width. The elastic modulus of a stretchable substrate was increased from 0.09 MPa to 0.13~0.33 MPa by embedding a Sylgard 184 island of 1 cm width and 1~6 cm length into the center part of the Dragon Skin 10 substrate matrix. The elastic modulus of a stretchable substrate was improved to 0.16~0.2 MPa by embedding a Sylgard 184 island of 4 cm length and 0.5~1.5 cm width and to 0.1421~0.154 MPa by embedding a Sylgard 184 island of 2 cm length and 0.5~1.5 cm width. With increasing the tensile strain of a stretchable substrate, deformation restriction of the locally stiffness-variant Sylgard 184 island was further enhanced due to substantial increase in the strength difference between Sylgard 184 and Dragon 10 at large strain.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.312-317
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• 2022

Piezoelectric energy harvesting has attracted increasing attention over the last decade as a means for generating sustainable and long-lasting energy from wasted mechanical energy. To develop self-powered wearable devices, piezoelectric materials should be flexible, stretchable, and bio-eco-friendly. This study proposed the fabrication of stretchable piezoelectric composites via dispersing perovskite-structured BaTiO₃ nanoparticles inside an Ecoflex polymeric matrix. In particular, the stretchable piezoelectric sensor array was fabricated via a simple and cost-effective spin-coating process by exploiting the piezoelectric composite comprising of BaTiO₃ nanoparticles, Ecoflex matrix, and stretchable Ag coated textile electrodes. The fabricated sensor generated an output voltage of ~4.3 V under repeated compressing deformations. Moreover, the piezoelectric sensor array exhibited robust mechanical stability during mechanical pushing of ~5,000 cycles. Finite element method with multiphysics COMSOL simulation program was employed to support the experimental output performance of the fabricated device. Finally, the stretchable piezoelectric sensor array can be used as a self-powered touch sensor that can effectively detect and distinguish mechanical stimuli, such as pressing by a human finger. The fabricated sensor demonstrated potential to be used in a stretchable, lead-free, and scalable piezoelectric sensor array.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.289-300
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• 2000

Stretchable textile materials are getting more widely used in clothing industry. Among others are two obvious reasons which make it so desirable to young female customers, i.e., better confort with motion and more closely fitted silhouette. But these two points cannot get along well always. If a manufacturer try hard to make his products too closely fit, then the products are even less comfortable than made of non-stretchable material. On the other hand, if a stretchable garment are developed to be too comfortable with plenty of size tolerance. it cannot attract customers who are looking for something closely fit. So the study was aimed to investigate appropriate size tolerances.

• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.48-57
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• 2019

As the super-aged society approaches rapidly, the number of people suffering from post-stroke and other neurological disorders is significantly increasing, where prompt and intensive rehabilitation is essential for such people to resume their physical activities in normal daily lives. To overcome the inherent limitations of manual physical therapy, various types of exoskeleton robots are being employed. However, the need of the hour is softer, thinner, lighter, and even stretchable systems for precisely monitoring the motion of each joint without restricting the patients' movements in rehabilitation tasks. In this paper, we discuss the technological trends and current status of emerging stretchable rehabilitation systems, in which sensors, interconnects, and signal-processing circuits are monolithically integrated within a single stretchable substrate attachable to the skin. Such skin-like stretchable rehabilitation devices are expected to provide much more convenient, user-friendly, and motivating rehabilitation to patients with neurological impairments.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.147-154
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• 2022

We demonstrate a new double-layer structure for stretchable interconnects, where the top surface of a serpentine polyimide support is coated with a thin eutectic gallium-indium liquid metal layer. Because the liquid metal layer is constantly fixed on the solid serpentine body in this liquid-on-solid structure, the overall stretching is accomplished by widening the solid frame itself, with little variation in the total length and cross-sectional area of the current path. Therefore, we can achieve both invariant resistance and infinite fatigue life by combining the stretchable configuration of the underlying body with the freely deformable nature of the top liquid conductor. Further, we fabricated various types of double-layer interconnects as narrow as 10 ㎛ using the roll-painting and lift-off patterning technique based on conventional photolithography and quantitatively validated their beneficial properties. The new interconnecting structure is expected to be widely used in applications requiring high-performance and high-density stretchable circuits owing to its superior reliability and capability to be monolithically integrated with thin-film devices.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.363.2-363.2
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• 2016

Stretchable strain sensors are becoming essential in diverse future applications, such as human motion detection, soft robotics, and various biomedical devices. One of the well-known approaches for fabricating stretchable strain sensors is to embed conductive nanomaterials such as metal nanowires/nanoparticles, graphene, conducting polymer and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) within an elastomeric substrate. Among various conducting nanomaterials, CNTs have been considered as important and promising candidate materials for stretchable strain sensors owing to their high electrical conductivity and excellent mechanical properties. In the past decades, CNT-based strain sensors with high stretchability or sensitivity have been developed. However, CNT-based strain sensors which show both high stretchability and sensitivity have not been reported. Herein, highly stretchable and sensitive strain sensors were fabricated by integrating single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and nylon textiles via vacuum-assisted spray-layer-by-layer process. Our strain sensors had high sensitivity with 100 % tensile strain (gauge factor ~ 100). Cyclic tests confirmed that our strain sensors showed very robust and reliable characteristic. Moreover, our SWNTs-based strain sensors were easily and successfully integrated on human finger and knee to detect bending and walking motion. Our approach presented here might be route to preparing highly stretchable and sensitive strain sensors with providing new opportunity to realize practical wearable devices.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.363.1-363.1
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• 2016

Transparent and stretchable conductors are expected to be an essential component in future stretchable optoelectronic devices. Until now, two main methods have been commonly employed to fabricate transparent and stretchable conductors by using metal nanomaterials: creating buckling configurations and creating network configurations. In this report, a novel strategy for obtaining transparent and stretchable conductors is presented, one that employs these two main approaches simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this proposed configuration of a buckled long nanofiber network in this study has not yet been reported. In order to provide the transparent conductors with dual mode stretchability originating from simultaneous buckled and network configurations, a buckled Au@polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) nanofiber network (hereafter referred to BANN for convenience) was fabricated by transferring Au-metallized electrospun PVP nanofibers onto a prestrained polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate. Our BANN shows considerably lower strain sensitivity of resistance than that of straight Au@PVP nanofiber network. Durability tests conducted by performing cyclic tensile strain reveal that the relative change in resistance of BANN (prestrain = 20%) is quite small after 1000 cycles. We also demonstrate that this BANN exhibits superior performance over widely used indium tin oxide conductors with regard to high optical transmittance and low sheet resistance.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.149-156
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• 2019

A stretchable thermoelectric module consisting of 5 pairs of Bi₂Te₃-based hot-pressed p-n thermoelectric legs was processed by filling the module inside with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and removing the top and bottom substrates. Its stretchable characteristics and power generation properties were measured. The integrity of the module was kept well even after 10 strain cycles ranging from 0 to 0.1. With increasing the tensile strain to 0.2, the module circuitry became open because of joint failure between Cu electrodes and thermoelectric legs. The stretchable thermoelectric module exhibited an open circuit voltage of 4.6 mV with a temperature difference of 2.2K across both ends of thermoelectric legs, and changes in its open circuit voltage were below 5% for tensile strains of 0~0.1. Being elongated for a strain of 0.1, it exhibited the maximum output power of 18.5 ㎼ with the temperature difference of 2.2K across its both ends.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.129-135
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• 2018

In the stretchable electronic devices, the stretchable substrate is a very essential material which determines the stretchability, performances and durability of the stretchable electronic devices. In particular, the current stretchable materials have hysteresis making difficult to used as sensors and other electronic devices. In this study, we developed a PDMS-Ecoflex hybrid stretchable substrate mixed with PDMS and Ecoflex material in order to increase stretchability and improve hysteresis characteristics. Mechanical behavior of the hybrid substrate was evaluated using a tensile test, and optical transmittance of the hybrid substrate was also measured. As the content of Ecoflex increases, the PDMS-Ecoflex hybrid substrate becomes more flexible, and the elastic modulus decreases. In addition, the PDMS substrate failed a tensile strain of 270%, while the PDMS-Ecoflex hybrid substrate did not fail even at 500% strain indicating excellent stretchability. In the repeated tensile test, the hybrid substrate with 2:1 mixing ratio of PDMS and Ecoflex showed hysteresis. On the other hand, in the case of the hybrid substrate with the mixing ratio of 1:1, hysteresis did not occur at a strain of 50% and 100%. Hence, we developed a stretchable substrate with over 150% stretchability and no hysteresis characteristics. The optical transmittance of the Ecoflex substrate was 68.6%, whereas the transmittances of the hybrid substrate with mixing ratio of 2:1 and 1:1 were 78.6% and 75.4%, respectively. These results indicate that the PDMS-Ecoflex hybrid substrate is a potential candidate for a transparent stretchable substrate.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.19-28
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• 2016

This paper presents an overview of selected advanced measurement technologies for the mechanical properties of polymers used for flexible and stretchable electronic packaging. Over the years, a variety of flexible and stretchable electronics have been developed due to their potential applications for next generation IT industry. To achieve more flexible and wearable devices for practical applications, the usage of polymeric components has been increased significantly. Therefore, accurate measurement of mechanical properties of the polymers is necessary in order to design mechanically reliable devices. However, the measurement has been challenging due to the soft nature and thin applications of polymers. Here, we describe novel measurement technologies of mechanical properties of polymers for flexible and stretchable electronics.