Volume 5, Issue 1 (2025) – 12 articles
Cover Picture: With the continuous development of agricultural intelligence, the emerging plant strain sensors demonstrate the capability of in situ monitoring plant growth and show significant potential in intelligent and digital agricultural applications. However, existing strain sensors still fail to meet practical requirements due to inevitable growth constraints, limited tensile properties, and complex fabrication procedures. Herein, we develop a simple and effective multimaterial all-3D printing technique for the integrated manufacturing of highly sensitive and stretchable adaptive hydrogel strain sensors. Such an all-3D-printed hydrogel strain sensor exhibits excellent sensing performance enabling precise detection of minor strains in plant growth, including high stretchability (>300%), high sensitivity (guage factor ~ 12.78) with nice linearity (0.98), and good long-term stability over 3000 loading/unloading cycles. We further validate the potential applications of our 3D-printed integrated strain sensor for accurate and continuous monitoring of bamboo growth in both horizontal and vertical directions over 14 days. Such an all 3D-printing technique provides a promising technical platform for integrated strain sensing systems and also opens a new avenue for plant growth monitoring in intelligent farming systems.
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