This review summarizes the recent developments and importance of wearable electronic textiles in the past decade. Wearable electronic textiles are an emerging interdisciplinary research area that requires new design approaches. This challenging interdisciplinary research field brings together specialists in electronics, information technology, microsystems, and textiles to make an innovation in the development of wearable electronic products. Wearable electronic textiles play a key role among various technologies (clothing, communication, information, healthcare monitoring, military, sensors, magnetic shielding, etc.). In this review, applications of wearable electronic textiles are described, including an investigation of their fabrication techniques. This review highlights the basic processes, possible applications, and main materials to build wearable E‐textiles and combines the fundamentals of E‐textiles for the readers who have different backgrounds. Moreover, reliability, reusability, and efficiency of wearable electronic textiles are discussed together with the opportunities and drawbacks of the wearable E‐textiles that are addressed in this review article.

In this study, a precursor for carbon nanofibers (CNF) was fabricated via electrospinning and carbonized through a thermal process. Before carbonization, oxidative stabilization should be applied, and the oxidation mechanism also plays an important role during carbonization. Thus, the understanding of the oxidation mechanism is an essential part of the production of CNF. The oxidation process of polyacrylonitrile was studied and nanofiber webs containing graphene oxide (GO) are obtained to improve the electrochemical properties of CNF. Structural and morphological characterizations of the webs are carried out by using attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Mechanical tests are performed with a dynamic mechanical analyzer, and thermal studies are conducted by using thermogravimetric analysis. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and cyclic voltammetry are used to investigate capacitive behavior of the products. The proposed equivalent circuit model was consistent with charge-transfer processes taking place at interior pores filled with electrolyte.

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Synthesis of a co‐polymer of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) producing a carbon nanofiber out of PAN and co‐polymer of PAN and comparison between these products were examined. Free‐radical solution copolymerization of acrylonitrile (AN) with acrylic acid (AA) was studied. In this perspective, AA, and AN were used as a precursor for polymerization reactions; then copolymers were synthesized by using ammonium persulfate (APS) as an oxidant and carried in water/dimethylformamide (DMF) mixture. These polymers were used to obtain corresponding electrospun nanofibers. Synthesized P(AN‐co‐AA) was investigated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy‐attenuated total reflection (FTIR‐ATR) spectroscopy, and characteristic peaks for AN unit, AA were achieved. Thermal behavior was examined by using differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and thermal gravimetric analyzer (TGA), and results indicated that addition of monomers to AN unit reduced the Tg value of homopolymer PAN compared to P(AN‐co‐AA), which provides improvement to the cyclization and the formation of a thermally stable aromatic ladder polymer chain formation. In order to prevent the shrinkage and maintain the molecular orientation on nanofiber webs during stabilization, tension was applied to the samples, and thermal oxidation varies at 200–300°C for different duration of times. Surface morphology of the fibers was observed with scanning electron microscope (SEM), and average nanofiber diameter was found 550 nm, and after carbonization it was reduced to 320 nm for homopolymer PAN, and for poly(AN‐co‐AA) average nanofiber diameter was found as 220 nm and reduced to 130 nm, respectively. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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