Fabrication of dual-side metal patterns onto textile substrates for wearable electronics by combining wax-dot printing with electroless plating

Abstract

Textile wearable electronics offer the consolidated advantages of both electronics and textile characteristics. Wearable electronic systems typically require conductive tracks as platform to form the integration of electronic components. Herein we developed a site-selective electroless plating process to construct dual-side Cu patterns onto textile substrates. The proposed craft was mainly comprised of four procedures, namely, 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane (APTMS)-modification, wax-pattern printing, selective Au-seeding and Cu-patterns deposition. Specifically, waxes were transferred from commercial wax impregnated papers to APTMS modified fabrics with the aid of a conventional stylus printer. Intensive waxed dots then composed a wax pattern which corresponded to the input image designed on the computer. The wax pattern acted as a hydrophobic mask on the fabric surface and hindered the covered areas from being activated by subsequent Au catalysts. The non-covered areas, in contrast, were APTMS naked surfaces which normally adsorbed Au nanoparticles and had Cu tracks grown. The minimum width of the Cu track was 400 μm with 3.57 % deviation and the typical resistivity was 7.52 μΩ cm, which was about 4.6 times of the bulk metal Cu (at room temperature). The reliabilities of textile-based conductive Cu patterns were confirmed by Air-exposure, Ultrasonic washing and Scotch®-tape tests. In addition, the universality and versatility of the proposed method were validated by fabricating different metal patterns on various types of flexible substrates.

Materials and Structures toward Soft Electronics

“…One main drawback with the weaving and knitting processes is their limited design freedom since the fiber/yarn paths are constrained to follow the warp or weft direction within the fabric . One way to solve this problem is to coat functional materials to textiles via inkjet or screen printing or electroless deposition, which give complete freedom for the design layouts since the functional materials are not tied to the fabric structure . Figure j shows a polyester fabric with different conductive patterns of nickel obtained by masked laser‐scribing and subsequent electroless plating.…”

Research on laser-assisted selective metallization of a 3D printed ceramic surface

“…Electroless Copper Plating (ECP) is widely used in the manufacture of integrated circuits and on-board antennas due to its low cost, strong production capacity, and low processing temperature. 18,22,23 However, Al 2 O 3 ceramics do not possess catalytic activity, so it must be pre-activated. The traditional Pd activation method of waste-liquid treatment is difficult, polluting, and costly.…”

Conductive, antibacterial, and electromagnetic shielding silver‐plated cotton fabrics activated by dopamine

“…Until now, much progress has been achieved in the area of conductive textiles, approaches include vapor deposition, electroplating, sputter coating, and electroless plating . It should be pointed that electroless plating is the optimum selection to modify the surface of textiles regarding its mild reaction conditions, simple equipment, and high efficiency to coat homogenously on many kinds of substrates .…”