Flexible artificial skin with multifunctional detection of temperature and flow

The thermal effect of human skin was concerned in this paper, and here we reported a flexible artificial skin for detection of air temperature and flow shear stress. The flexible artificial skin was consisting of two overlapped functional devices. The bottom layer heater detected the flow shear stress and air temperature through force convection heat transfer process, while the upper layer temperature sensor sensed a coupling temperature. This coupled working mode simulated the perception system of human skin. The neural network algorithm was used to train the relationship model of coupled multi physical parameters, and the flow shear stress and air temperature were decoupled. The flexible artificial skin achieved resolutions of 0.915 Pa to flow shear stress and 0.068 °C to air temperature. Moreover, the temperature compensation of the heater could be omitted by this coupling measurement method. This kind of flexible artificial skin opened new avenues for the intelligent robot, artificial skin and multilayer composite flexible electronics.