Silk Fibroin Based Conductive Film for Multifunctional Sensing and Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Development of biomaterial based flexible electronics has got intensive attention owing to the potential applications in the wearable and epidermal devices. Silk fibroin, as a natural textile material with excellent performance, has been widely concerned by industry and academy. However, the property of electrical insulation limits his development in the field of flexible electronics. In this paper, a regenerated silk fibroin/carbon nanotube (RSF/CNT) conductive film has been successfully fabricated and applied in flexible capacitive-type pressure sensor and wearable triboelectric nanogenerator by a facile method. The electrical conductivity and mechanical property of RSF/CNT film was optimized by investigating with different composite ratio from 10 to 90% (W-RSF/W-CNT). The RSF/CNT film has a good photothermal response and electric heating performance. We furtherly demonstrated that the RSF/CNT based sensor can be used as epidermal self-powered sensor for multifunction human motion monitoring and Morse code compilation. The observed research results have shown that the RSF/CNT film has a wide range of potential application prospects in the wearable electronics field.