Conductive polymers for smart textile applications

Abstract

Smart textiles are fabrics able to sense external conditions or stimuli, to respond and adapt behaviour to them in an intelligent way and present a challenge in several fields today such as health, sport, automotive and aerospace. Electrically conductive textiles include conductive fibres, yarns, fabrics, and final products made from them. Often they are prerequisite to functioning smart textiles, and their quality determines durability, launderability, reusability and fibrous performances of smart textiles. Important part in smart textiles development has conductive polymers which are defined as organic polymers able to conduct electricity. They combine some of the mechanical features of plastics with the electrical properties typical for metals. The most attractive in a group of these polymers are polyaniline (PANI), polypyrrole (PPy) and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) as one of the polythiophene (PTh) derivatives. Commercially available smart textile products where conductive polymers have crucial role for their development are medical textiles, protective clothing, touch screen displays, flexible fabric keyboards, and sensors for various areas. This paper is focused on conductive polymers description, mechanism of their conductivity, and various approaches to produce electrically conductive textiles for smart textiles needs. Commercial products of conductive polymers-based smart textiles are presented as well as the objective of a number of lab-scale items.

Thermal Transport in Conductive Polymer–Based Materials

“…Conductive polymers and their composites have attracted much attention due to their outstanding characteristics, such as light weight, low cost, recyclability, and excellent electrical conductivity and chemical stability. Recent advancements in wearable smart devices have brought great convenience to human life . Devices such as touch screen displays, health monitoring sensors, functional clothing and other smart textile products all rely on the excellent electrical and mechanical properties of conductive polymers materials.…”

Investigating the Impact of Washing Cycles on Silver-Plated Textile Electrodes: A Complete Study

“…One of the main reasons is the fact that wearable textronic prototypes suffer from poor washability and reliability [3]. The need to study the impact of the washing process on textronics was underlined back in 2004 [4] and it is all the more relevant that smart textiles are on the edge of being commercialized [5]. However, few research papers have tackled this particular issue until now, although it can be noted that the washability aspect of recent developments is more clearly taken into account [6][7][8].…”

Preparation of High Performance Conductive Polyaniline Magnetite (PANI/Fe3O4) Nanocomposites by Sol-Gel Method

“…The peak of the pure Fe3O4 nanoparticles appear at 475 cm -1 and 694 cm -1 is assigned to the Fe-O stretching vibration [13,14]. It is equally observed that the characteristic peak of PANI/F3O4 nanocomposites appeared at 3322 cm -1 (N-H stretching), 1517 cm -1 , 1545 cm -1 (C=C vibration stretching and deformation of benzenoid ring and quinoid respectively) [20,21]. At peak 1308 cm -1 represent for (C-N vibrating stretching of aromatic secondary amine), 1118 cm -1 as well as 900-800 cm -1 assigned for (C-N are out of plane deformation in 1,4-distributed benzene ring) which signified the presence of PANI contain Fe3O4 nanoparticles [13,22].…”