Highly Aligned Cellulose/Polypyrrole Composite Nanofibers via Electrospinning and In Situ Polymerization for Anisotropic Flexible Strain Sensor

Flexible strain sensors have recently attracted great attention due to their promising applications in human motion detection, healthcare monitoring, human-machine interfaces, and so forth. However, traditional uniaxial strain sensors can only detect strain in a single direction. Herein, an anisotropic flexible strain sensor is fabricated based on conductive and highly aligned cellulose composite nanofibers, via facile electrospinning cellulose acetate, deacetylation, and in situ polymerization of pyrrole, to detect complex multidimensional strains. Benefiting from the unique well-ordered structure of conductive composite nanofibers, the obtained strain sensor shows extraordinary anisotropic sensing performance with a sensitivity of 0.73 and 0.01 for the tensile applied perpendicular and parallel to the nanofiber alignment, respectively. The sensor also exhibits outstanding durability (2000 cycles) due to the strong hydrogen bonding between cellulose nanofibers and polypyrrole. Moreover, the flexible strain sensors exhibit promising potentials for application in motion detection, as demonstrated by the detection of various joint movements in the human body.