Development of Electromagnetic Shielding Wearable Electronic Textiles using Core Conductive Fabrics

Abstract

Today wearable electronics are playing a vital role in many applications such as Military, Medical application, telecommunications and health care garments. Conductive textiles also provide wide range of applications in areas of civilian and military purposes. In this research work an attempt has been made to design and develop core-sheath conductive yarns with copper filament and optical fibre as core and cotton as sheath using Dref-3 Friction spinning system. The special guide mechanism has been designed and used to produce uniform structure of core-sheath conductive yarns. Three different core-sheath ratios such as 67/33, 80/20 and 90/10 respectively, were produced by varying the draft in the second drafting unit which fed the cotton carded slivers to cover the core component. Copper filament of 38 SWG British Standard Gauge has been used as core component. The nominal count of core-sheath conductive yarn produced in this research was 328 tex and core component kept as constant 261 tex for all the yarn samples. Optical core conductive yarns are produced by using CK-20 type optical fibres. The process parameters such as perforated drum speed and yarn delivery speed are 4000 revolution per minute and 70 metres per minute respectively, kept as constant for all the samples. The copper core conductive yarns were used to develop the conductive fabrics. These fabrics have very good scope for many applications for development of electromagnetic shielding wearable textiles, mobile phone charging and body temperature sensing garments. It also has the optical fibre core conductive yarns which were used for the development of signal transferring garment for telecommunication and data transferring purpose. In this work two sensors have been integrated in sensorized garments for monitoring the body temperature. Moreover, it has been pointed out the use of these sensorized garments as a valid alternative to existing instrumentations which are in several health care areas. The results on the copper core conductive yarns and Optical core conductive yarns have studied. The characteristics of core conductive fabrics such as air permeability, tensile strength, electromagnetic shielding effect, aerial density, and fabric cover factor have been analysed. The performance of the conductive fabric garment has been briefly reported. The copper core conductive yarn, Optical core conductive yarn, copper conductive fabric and conductive fabric garment have the very high potential which is to be commercialized.