Environmentally-friendly conductive cotton fabric as flexible strain sensor based on hot press reduced graphene oxide

Abstract

A flexible conductive cotton fabric was demonstrated by formulation and deposition of a graphene oxide (GO) dispersion onto a cotton fabric by vacuum filtration. The final deposited GO amount was controlled by the concentration and volume of the GO dispersion. The GO was reduced by a hot press method at 180 ºC for 60 mins, and no chemical reductant was needed in both the deposition and reduction processes. The carbon-oxygen ratio increased from 1.77 to 3.72 after the hot press reduction. The asprepared flexible conductive cotton fabric showed a sheet resistance as low as 0.9 kΩ/sq. The sheet resistance of the conductive cotton fabric only increased from ~ 0.9 kΩ/sq to ~ 1.2 kΩ/sq after 10 washing cycles, exhibiting good washability. The conductive cotton fabric showed viability as a strain sensor even after 400 bending cycles, in which the stable change in the electrical resistance went from ~ 3500 kΩ under tensile strain to ~ 10 kΩ under compressive strain. This cost-effective and environmentally-friendly method can be easily extended to scalable production of reduced GO based flexible conductive cotton fabrics.

Textile‐Based Strain Sensor for Human Motion Detection

“…Apart from intrinsically conductive fibers, conventional fibers can be transformed into conductive fibers or functionalized fibers by coating them with conductive materials (i.e., metals, conductive polymers, or carbon nanotubes). The coating techniques, including chemical polymerization, evaporative deposition, spray coating, vacuum filtration and dip coating with conductive polymers, metals films/nanoparticles, and carbon nanomaterials, are commonly used to treat fibers, yarns, and fabrics to achieve conductive textiles. For instance, Fan et al developed polyaniline (PANI)‐coated polyurethane (PU) fiber strain sensor by in situ polymerization with a large detecting scope of up to ~1 500% and a GF of ~3 at 400% strain.…”

Recent Advances in Soft E-Textiles

“…Among such fabrics is nanocarbon-based conductive textiles. The integration of graphene, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and carbon nano/micro fibers (CNFs) with textiles is worth mentioning [48][49][50][51][52]. Electrospinning and melt spinning techniques have been used to produce polymeric nano/micro fibers, which have thereafter been carbonized to fabricate conducting carbon fabrics.…”

New Perspectives on Graphene/Polymer Fibers and Fabrics for Smart Textiles: The Relevance of the Polymer/Graphene Interphase

“…Torrisi et al (Ren et al, 2017) infiltrated cotton fabrics with GO dispersions by vacuum filtration and then reduced them by hot pressing at 180°C. The produced textiles maintained their conductivity after a few washing cycles and also demonstrated potential as strain sensors, retaining this property for more than 400 bending cycles.…”