Smart mechano-hydro-dielectric coupled hybrid sponges for multifunctional sensors

Since smart materials and structures that holds the capability of automatically conducting shape transformation or functional variation upon environmental condition changes are critical in developing advanced components for intelligent devices and apparatus, such as sensors, actuators, self-recovery and self-healing systems. Generally, either physical or chemical approach would be applied to meet the stimulus-response modes for realizing smart shape or functional changes. In the present contribution, novel mechano-hydro-dielectric coupled graphene oxide hybrid sponges are proposed to integrate the physical and chemical approach into a smart material. Based on investigation on the decoupled features from mechano-dielectric (physical approach) and hydro-dielectric (chemical approach) modes, the mechano-hydro-dielectric coupled features suggest that integration of physical and chemical approaches would substantially promote the change ratios of each single approach, which implies both hydro-enhanced mechano-dielectric and mechano-enhanced hydro-dielectric coupled stimulus-response modes. According to the mechanism discussion from effective medium theory, the results from indicate that such mechano-hydro-dielectric coupled hybrid sponges promise a great stage to establish multifunctional sensors (both mechanical and humidity sensors) based on various physical-chemical coupled modes.