Flow-Sensory Contact Electrification of Graphene

All-electronic interrogation of biofluid flow velocity by sensors incorporated in ultra-low-power or self-sustained systems offers the promise of enabling multifarious emerging research and applications. Electrical sensors based on nanomaterials are of high spatiotemporal resolution and exceptional sensitivity to external flow stimulus and easily integrated and fabricated using scalable techniques. But existing nano-based electrical flow-sensing technologies remain lacking in precision and stability and are typically only applicable to simple aqueous solutions or liquid/gas dual-phase mixtures, making them unsuitable for monitoring low-flow (~micrometer/second) yet important characteristics of continuous biofluids (e.g., hemorheological behaviors in microcirculation). Here we show that monolayer-graphene single microelectrodes harvesting charge from continuous aqueous flow provide an ideal flow sensing strategy: Our devices deliver over six months stability and sub-micrometer/second resolution in real-time quantification of whole-blood flows with multiscale amplitude-temporal characteristics in a microfluidic chip. The flow transduction is enabled by low-noise charge transfer at graphene/water interface in response to flow-sensitive rearrangement of the interfacial electrical double layer. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using a graphene-based self-powered strategy for monitoring biofluid flow velocity with key performance metrics orders of magnitude higher than other electrical approaches.

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