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Bacterial cellulose/MWCNT coatings for highly sensitive and flexible paper-based humidity sensors

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Abstract

As a human-computer interaction technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), non-contact humidity sensors have been widely explored. However, traditional humidity sensors have become a bottleneck in the development of flexible electronics owing to their complex processes and non-degradability. Here, bacterial cellulose (BC) and MWCNT were sequentially coated on paper to construct a durable and highly sensitive bacterial cellulose/MWCNT humidity sensor (BCNT). The BC endows the paper substrate with dense structure and significantly reduces the consumption of active materials (6.7 times reduction). Further, the well-dispersed CNT coating forms an interlocking structure with the BC nano-network, which results in a high mechanical strength (66.3 MPa). The maximum response of BCNT02 can be up to 94.5% (− ΔI/I0) under 98% RH, and the response and recovery times were 150 and 297 s, respectively. Moreover, the high humidity sensitivity of the BCNT make it an excellent choice for research and development of humidity sensors for respiration detection, non-contact switching and humidity localization.

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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary information files.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Key Research Program of China (No. 2020YFC1910301); Innovation Pilot Project of Integration of Science, Education and Industry of Shandong Province (No. 2020KJC-ZD06); Foundation (No. ZZ20190111 & No. ZZ20210104) of State Key Laboratory of Biobased Material and Green Papermaking, Qilu University of Technology; Shandong Academy of Sciences; National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22001140) and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (No. ZR2020QB002 & No. ZR2021QB009 & No. ZR2021QC158); Key Research Program of Shandong Province (No. 2021CXGC011002 & No. 2019JZZY010304).

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Contributions

HM: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing-original draft, preparation, Writing-review & editing. ZL: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing-Validation, Writing-review & editing. JL: Investigation, Visualization, and Project administration. QD: Project administration. YJ: Writing-review & editing. XL: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. WH: Conceptualization, Methodology, Visualization, Formal analysis, Data curation, Supervision, Writing-original draft, Writing-review & editing.

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Correspondence to **a Li or Wenjia Han.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interest or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Ma, H., Liu, Z., Lou, J. et al. Bacterial cellulose/MWCNT coatings for highly sensitive and flexible paper-based humidity sensors. Cellulose 30, 1193–1204 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-022-04960-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-022-04960-5

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