Destructive-Treatment-Free Rapid Polymer-Assisted Metal Deposition for Versatile Electronic Textiles

Abstract

Highly conductive, durable, and breathable metalcoated textiles are critical building block materials for future wearable electronics. In order to enhance the metal adhesion on the textile surface, existing solution-based approaches to preparing these materials require time-consuming presynthesis and/or premodification processes, typically in the order of tens of minutes to hours, on textiles prior to metal plating. Herein, we report a UVinduced rapid polymer-assisted metal deposition (r-PAMD) that offers a destructive-treatment-free process to deposit highly conductive metals on a wide variety of textile materials, including cotton, polyester, nylon, Kevlar, glass fiber, and carbon cloth. In comparison to the state of the arts, r-PAMD significantly shortens the modification time to several minutes and is compatible with the roll-to-roll fabrication manner. Moreover, the deposited metals show outstanding adhesion, which withstands rigorous flexing, abrasion, and machine washing tests. We demonstrate that these metal-coated textiles are suitable for applications in two vastly different fields, being wearable and washable sensors, and lithium batteries.

Porous Conductive Textiles for Wearable Electronics

“…A catalyst-affinitive polymer was grafted onto the textile substrate via free-radical polymerization to serve as both seeding and adhesive layers for metals. 222 Recently, Zhang et al 223 developed a versatile method called rapid-PAMD which is capable of depositing metals (Ni, Cu, Ag, and Au) on multiple textile substrates such as cotton, polyester, Kevlar, and nylon fabrics (Figure 13c). In this method, the polymer modification process was shortened to less than 3 min, and no damage was caused to the mechanical strength of textile substrates.…”

A Review of Structure Engineering of Strain‐Tolerant Architectures for Stretchable Electronics

“…[92] It was found that the interlayer with both high Young's modulus and high-yield strain can reduce the actual strain on the upper rigid film in deformation. Experiments were carried out for the investigation of the crack behavior and electrical resistance change of the Cu film on a plastic substrate coated with different types of interlayers, e.g., polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), Cr, and Cu-polymer nanocomposite, which was fabricated through polymer-assisted metal deposition (PAMD), [142][143][144][145][146][147] These interlayers have different elastoplastic material properties, and thus show different strain tolerance, which is in good agreement with the principle. In comparison to strain isolation, the strategy can be considered stress isolation (Figure 9b) in that stress is concentrated on the stiff interlayer rather than being transferred to the functional components.…”

Elasto-Plastic Design of Ultrathin Interlayer for Enhancing Strain Tolerance of Flexible Electronics

“…The rapid development of flexible electronics in the past decade has enabled a wide variety of emerging applications ranging from a soft human–machine interface, electronic skin, − energy, , and implantable bioelectronics to flexible and stretchable displays − and smart wearables. − Because flexible devices are highly deformable, materials in these devices experience different degrees of tensile strains during the bending, stretching, compressing, and twisting of the devices. , While polymeric substrates used for fabricating the devices are often compliant enough, other materials such as metals, inorganic semiconductors, and ceramics are too brittle to withstand the tensile strains. Unfortunately, despite the intensive effort to develop various types of soft materials in the past decades, these brittle materials are still indispensable in most device applications. − For example, a metal is widely used as the electrode, interconnect, lead, and contact in flexible electronics due to the intrinsically high conductivity and excellent compatibility with conventional manufacturing processes .…”