Flexible and Transparent Conductive Meshes with Localized Cracks for Highly Sensitive Straining Sensing in Transparent Components

The transparent components of aircraft cockpit canopies undergo complex strain during flight, making effective strain monitoring crucial. Traditional rigid sensors face installation challenges on complex curved surfaces of cockpit canopies, while commercial strain gauges struggle to combine high transmittance with high sensitivity. This paper aims to develop a flexible, transparent, and highly sensitive strain sensor for real-time monitoring of transparent aircraft cockpit canopies. The sensor utilizes polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as a flexible substrate and adopts a mesh-like design to ensure high transparency. By integrating silver conductive meshes with localized spontaneous crack patterns, the sensor achieves ultrahigh sensitivity capable of detecting minute strains as low as 0.001%, which is critical for identifying early-stage structural anomalies. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed sensor exhibits exceptional sensitivity (with a gauge factor of 1061 within a 1% strain range) while maintaining a visible light transmittance of 81.67%. The sub-millistrain resolution further ensures precise monitoring of subtle deformations under dynamic flight conditions. This sensing strategy has minimal impact on the optical performance of cockpit canopies, providing an effective technical solution for lightweight integrated health monitoring of transparent aerospace components.