High-consistency silicone rubber with reduced Young's modulus. An industrial option to dielectric silicone rubber

Abstract

Flexible capacitive sensors based on silicone rubber have gained importance inboth academic and industrial fields due to their advantages, including lowpower consumption and high stability to temperature, and humidity. However,pristine silicone rubber has a low dielectric constant (ε0), requiring the use ofdielectric additives such as TiO 2 , BaTiO 3 , or Sb 2 O3 -doped SnO 2 rutile-modifiedparticles (ATO) to enhance electrical properties, but they also increase Young'smodulus (E). To overcome this problem, liquid silicone rubbers (LSR) are com-monly used in academic research due to their low E, but they often compromisemechanical integrity. In contrast, high-consistency silicone rubbers (HCR), theindustry commodity, maintain mechanical integrity even at high filler loadingsbut are limited in their use in dielectrics due to high E values. This paperexplores the potential of vinyl-terminated HCR for developing dielectric compos-ites with high electromechanical response, with an improved ε0 and a reduced Ewhile retaining mechanical and processability properties. The resulting dielec-tric HCR formulations exhibit optimal properties for developing flexible capac-itive sensors using well-established industrial products and processes