| Large-area electronics are typically fabricated from petroleum-based polymers. However, petroleum has negative impacts on the environment and is expected to last for only another 80 years. Much attention, as a result, has been brought to minimize the usage of petroleum-based products and move towards environmental friendly products. This thesis presents a bio-based soft elastic capacitor (SEC), which is flexible and mainly made of water and vegetable oil. The SEC is composed of dielectric sandwiched between two electrode layers and it is used in structural health monitoring applications. The linearity of the sensor and its ability to transduce local strain of large surfaces into change in capacitance is demonstrated in this work. Additionally, the materials properties was tested and good physical and chemical properties are shown despite a decay of the dielectric that occurs after the first 16 days of fabrication. |
