Development and analysis of a capacitive touch sensor using a liquid metal droplet

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a small-sized capacitive touch sensor with large variations in its capacitance. This sensor uses the changes in capacitance caused by the variation of the overlap area between a liquid metal (LM) droplet and a flat electrode while keeping the gap between the droplet and the bottom electrode at a small constant value (i.e. thickness of dielectric layer). Initially, the droplet is placed inside a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chamber, and a thin silicon dioxide film separates the droplet and the electrode. Owing to the high surface tension of the LM, the droplet retains its spherical shape and the overlap area remains small, which means that the capacitance between the droplet and the electrode also remains small. When normal force is applied, the pressure on the membrane pushes the droplet downward, thus spreading the droplet to the bottom of the chamber and increasing the capacitance. To verify our concept, we performed theoretical analyses and experiments using a 2 mm x 2 mm x 2 mm 1-cell touch sensor. Finally, we obtained a capacitance variation of similar to 30 pF by applying forces between 0 N and 1 N.