Design and simulation of a flexible piezoelectric sensing array with stable sensitivity and high duty cycle

Abstract

Flexible piezoelectric sensing arrays (FPSA) have an irreplaceable role in the fields of stress detection and self-energy supply and are part of the current hotspots of research in flexible electronics. In this paper, a FPSA with stable sensitivity and high duty cycle is designed to achieve high sensitivity over a wide range and a high duty cycle of 84.17%. The sensing unit uses two inverted trapezoidal prismatic structures (ITPS) with piezoelectric layers with stable sensitivity to pressure. For practical fabrication, a single-electrode array and cut package are proposed to solve the crosstalk problem between the highly duty cycle array units. The single-electrode array reduces the array structure’s complexity and the process’s difficulty. The cut package reduces crosstalk between units and improves the stress sensitivity of the array. Comsol Multiphysics and Abaqus provide strong validation and analysis of this design. The designed FPSA, which has demonstrated excellent performance in simulation analysis, significantly decreases the time and economic cost of device preparation. Given the compelling features, this study offers an effective solution for mitigating unit crosstalk in flexible sensing arrays, which hold significant academic research promise and application value.