A woven 2D touchpad sensor and a 1D slide sensor using soft capacitor fibers

Recently reported soft conductive-polymer-based capacitor fibers are used to build a fully woven 2D touchpad sensor and a 1D slide sensor. An individual capacitor fiber features a swiss-roll like structure having two dielectric and two conductive polymer films rolled together in a classic multilayer capacitor configuration. The soft fibers of sub-1 mm outer diameter are fabricated using a fiber drawing procedure from a macroscopic polymeric preform. An individual capacitor fiber is then demonstrated to act as a distributed sensor that allows the touch position to be determined by measuring the fiber's AC response. In other words, a single fiber acts as a 1D slide sensor. Furthermore, we develop an electrical ladder network model to predict the distributed sensor properties of an individual fiber and show that this model describes the experimental measurements very well. Finally, a two-dimensional touchpad sensor is presented. The sensor is built by weaving a one-dimensional array of capacitor fibers in parallel to each other. The performance of the touchpad sensor is then characterized. (paper)