Composites of Polymer and Carbon Nanostructures for Self-Healing Chemical Sensors

Despite recent dramatic development of materials with self-healing ability, fabrication of a self-healing devices remains challenging. In this paper, truly self-healing composites consisting polymers and carbon nanostructures are reported. Using a modified fabrication technique - called "layer-by-layer stamping" - chemical sensors are produced and characterized by infrared spectroscopy and various microscopy techniques. As a demonstration of the ability of the developed sensors to coexist with harsh operation conditions, the performance of the sensors under exposure to volatile organic compounds that are derived from human breath/skin is evaluated under different conditions of cutting and self-healing cycles. The results show a discrimination ability of the selected sensors to return to an operation level of 70%-100% after cutting and 24 h healing of the composite film. From this analysis, the discriminative power of the self-healing sensor array remains high for the majority of analyte discrimination even after mechanical injury, thus strengthening the potential of such arrays for use in health monitoring applications based on detection of analyte patterns.