Stress and Resistance Relaxation for Carbon Nanoparticle Silicone Rubber Composite Large-Strain Sensors

The high stretchability, scalability and bio-compatibility of carbon black nanoparticle (CB)-polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomer composites are attractive characteristics for diverse applications ranging from the biomedical to aerospace fields. These materials are particularly useful as high strain sensors, but show stress relaxation and resistance relaxation behaviour that must be better understood in order to improve sensing performance and optimize the material design. In this work, we have characterized and modelled the resistance relaxation behaviour of these composites to understand the response of resistance to transient step strain input. CB-PDMS specimens have been fabricated with 7.5 and 10 weight percentage (w.t.%) of CB and subjected to repeated stretching while continually monitoring resistance and stress. A model for the resistive relaxation in time has been developed using 30 relaxations to give maximum coefficients of variance of the constants of 18.54% and 52.72% for 7.5 and 10 w.t.% of CB. The ability to model resistance relaxation is useful for the development of, accurate, highly flexible dynamic strain sensors.