A fully woven touchpad sensor based on soft capacitor fibers

Abstract

A novel, highly flexible capacitor fiber (with 100 nF m-1 typical capacitance per length) having a multilayer periodic structure of dielectric and conductive polymer composite films is fabricated by drawing technique. The fiber is used to build a woven touchpad sensor. Then, we study the influence of the fiber length, capacitance and volume resistivity on the touch sensing performance. A theoretical ladder network model of a fiber network is developed. A fully woven textile sample incorporating one-dimension array of the capacitor fibers is fabricated. Finally we show that such an array functions as a two-dimensional touch sensor.