Pulsed laser-assisted direct fabrication of MoxW1-xS2 alloy-based flexible strain sensors with superior performance for high-temperature applications

Abstract

Flexible strain sensors with high sensitivity and stability at high temperatures are significantly desirable for their accurate and long-term signal detection in wearable devices, environment monitoring, and aerospace electronics. Despite the considerable efforts in materials development and structural design, it remains a challenge to develop highly sensitive, flexible strain sensors operating at high temperatures due to the trade-off between sensitivity and stability for the representative sensing materials. Herein, we develop a high-temperature flexible sensor using MoxW1-xS2 alloy films. A pulsed laser is introduced to directly synthesize MoxW1-xS2 patterns with controllable compositions and physical parameters, enabling the realization of flexible sensors without photolithography or transfer procedures. The resultant flexible sensors exhibit a high gauge factor of 97.4, a low strain detection of 4.9 με, and strong tolerance to a temperature of 500 °C. Owing to its superior performance, we develop a wireless acoustic recognition system to distinguish tiny strain signals of tuning forks with a vibration frequency up to 128 Hz under extreme temperature conditions. The laser method for the direct fabrication of MoxW1-xS2 alloy-based flexible sensors holds great potential in the precise detection of strain signals from complex structures at high temperatures.