The challenge in the industry is that capacitive touch can be sensitive to user movement and stretching. As the user moves, capacitive electrodes can prematurely activate, which limits user mobility and confines the immersive experiences.
UES’ new ELMNTTM Liquid Metal Ink solves many of the challenges for capacitive touch sensing. ELMNT ink is not only flexible and robust, but also has the ability to maintain constant electronic properties while stretching with minimal hysteresis.
Parkison showed that ELMNT ink works well for mutual capacitance, even when stretched. Traditional silver and carbon based inks are not capable of achieving this type of sensing sometimes even while just being slightly flexed or under any appreciable amount of strain. The increase in resistance other materials experience really inhibits most sensing applications as well as power and data transmission capabilities.
ELMNT overcomes the challenges of multi touch sensing for a wide variety of applications such as augmented reality, soft robotics, and wearable devices.
The video demonstration below displays some of these capabilities under various strains in a bi-axial strain setup. The mutual capacitance array was fabricated using ELMNT.BA ink specially formulated for blade coating over a PET stencil cutout that was produced using a laser cutter and placed onto a TPU substrate. This device was connected to an MSP430FR2676 capacitive touch sensing chip made by Texas Instruments. Using TI's captivate design studio along side code composer studio enabled tuning a wide variety of parameters to get the best performance out of sensors even while under uniaxial and biaxial strain. You can see that the ELMNT.BA sensor responds at multiple strains and cycles, to capacitive touch.
You can learn more about ELMNT and how it can help you solve your flexible electronics challenges. Have particular material challenges you’d like to discuss with our experts? Contact us here.
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