A superelastic SiOC@carbon ceramic spring for multifunctional pressure sensor in wide temperature range

With the flourishing development in space exploration and human motion detection, the wide-temperature flexible pressure sensors are urgently required in various complex application situations. One massive challenge of current available sensors is to enhance the oxidation resistance property, which is crucial for their applications in high-temperature environments. Herein, we fabricated a superelastic silicon oxycarbide @carbon (SiOC@C) ceramic spring, possessing a porous lamellar and spring-like structure. The spring-like structure tends to deform and absorb the energy under the external loads, and then the anisotropic lamellar structure can effectively and uniformly release the stress. The as-prepared SiOC@C spring exhibits excellent superelasticity, high compressibility (60%), and robustness (∼99.0% maximum stress retention after 1000 cycles at 50% compression). Meanwhile, the SiOC@C spring-derived sensor possesses a high sensitivity under low pressure (282.46 kPa −1 at < 1.3 kPa), a low detection limit (< 0.098 Pa) and a short response/recovery time (∼12 ms/4 ms). Moreover, benefiting from the high/low-temperature resistance of SiOC nanolayer coated on the carbon framework, the SiOC@C spring-based sensor can function properly at a wide temperature range from − 196 °C to 500 °C, showing the potential application in various fields of biomedical monitoring, space exploration, and automotive industries.