Abstract
Development of smart textiles is an emerging discipline in the last two decades where a conductive element is integrated into a textile material by some means. The purpose of this research was to develop a conductive textile fabric by coating with charcoal as a conductive element. The charcoal was produced by carbonizing the eucalyptus wood at a temperature of 928 °C for 37 min producing 59.17% w/w of fixed carbon yield and conductivity of 463.34 Sm−1 (Siemens per meter) compared to immeasurable conductivity of the wood. This was followed by characterization of physical and chemical properties of charcoal. Thereafter, a cotton fabric was pad-coated with a dispersion based on the charcoal. The paper herein reports the results of preparing different recipes using different quantities of charcoal particles with other components of the coating mixture, which was tested to obtain the best coating in terms of electrical conductivity. The optimal concentration of the conductive particles of the charcoal was studied. Performance evaluation of the coated fabric was assessed for the durability of fabric towards different fastness agents. The effect of charcoal loading on thermal and sensorial comfort of the fabric in addition to the air and water permeability was studied and a significant change was observed. Finally, a proof of concept was developed to demonstrate if the resulting pieces of information during the process were viable. As observed, the pad-coated cotton fabric using charcoal showed increased electrical conductivity from 1.58 × 10−12 Scm−1 (Siemens per centimeter) for the controlled sample to 124.49 Scm−1 for the coated sample designating that the resulting fabric is in a conductor category.
Highlights
In the last two decades, e-textiles, including conductive textiles have gained great attention from many researchers due to their widespread applications in biomedical devices, sensing and actuating, data processing and communication, energy conversion and storage, electromagnetic shielding, etc. [1]
There is the formation of the synthetic graphite upon the removal of volatile matters due to structural rearrangement [37], the remaining mineral impurities act as donors or acceptors and thereby drastically improving the electrical conductivity of the carbon charcoal [35,38]
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Summary
In the last two decades, e-textiles, including conductive textiles have gained great attention from many researchers due to their widespread applications in biomedical devices, sensing and actuating, data processing and communication, energy conversion and storage, electromagnetic shielding, etc. [1]. Textile materials like cotton fabric have very low electrical conductivity with a typical surface resistivity of 107 –1016 Ω/m2 [2], which can be considered as low conductive materials. Making textile materials can be a research direction in the materials science arena. There are several options to make textile materials electrically conductive. By making textile materials electrically conductive, it is possible to replace metal fibers in the form of thin metal filaments that were used previously, which are brittle, heavier and more difficult to process than conventional textile fibers [1]. The coating of textile fibers and fabrics with metallic salts has been used as another option, but these have limited stability during laundering [4]
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