Fig. 1: Principle, design, and potential applications of contact-dominated localized electric-displacement-field-enhanced pressure sensors.

a Schematic of contact-dominated localized electric-displacement-field-enhanced capacitive pressure sensors (polydimethylsiloxane/carbon nanotubes, PDMS/CNTs). b Electric displacement field (marked with white arrows) and electric potential distributions in the hierarchical microstructured electrodes before (left) and after (right) increasing the dielectric constant or reducing the dielectric thickness. c Electric energy density and electric displacement field (marked with white arrows) distributions before (left) and after (right) increasing the dielectric constant or reducing the dielectric thickness. d Cross-sectional view of the electric potential distribution before applying pressure and under a high pressure. e Normalized capacitance change with the normalized contact area change (ΔA^cont/A_base, where A_base is the area of the base surface of the microstructures) for a microstructured dielectric (microstruc. dielectric), a microstructured electrode (microstruc. electrode), a microstructured electrode with air gaps (microstruc. electrode^air), and our contact-dominated design (contact dominated) obtained via analytical models and finite element method (FEM) simulations. Right: the corresponding simplified circuit models. f Schematic of the integration of floating-gate low-dimensional thin film transistors (TFTs) with the contact-dominated design (left); our pressure sensors have the potential to evaluate the physical properties of fluids and enable robots to perform manipulation tasks (right), scale bar, 1.5 cm. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.