Electrical/optical dual-energy-driven MXene fabric-based heater with fast response actuating and human strain sensing

Abstract

Multi-functional smart textiles are receiving a lot of attention for their tremendous application development in the fields of personal thermal management, artificial muscle, electronic skin, and human-machine interaction. For the complex use of many different smart textiles, designing a multifunctional textile that integrates personal thermal management, smart sensing, and flexible actuating is still a great challenge. Here, we decorated MXene on elastic fabrics by simple dip-coating and asymmetric Ecoflex encapsulation protocol to obtain electrical/optical dual-energy-driven wearable heaters with highly responsive actuating and strain-sensing performance. The MXene fabric-based heaters (MFHs) have high efficiency of Joule heating (Steady state temperature of 116.7 °C at 12 V) and photothermal conversion performance (180.3 °C in 60 s under the near infrared lamp irradiation, up to 57.5 °C under 600 W m–2 simulated solar irradiation). Benefiting from high electrical/optical dual-energy conversion efficiency, MFH has a fast photothermal driving effect (bending angle up to 360° in 5 s) due to the different curvature of thermal expansion on both sides of the fabric. Interestingly, MFH has the capability to monitor human strain (such as muscle and joint movements). Based on the above excellent performance, we finally believe that the MFHs have broad application prospects in the fields of all-weather body heat management, health monitoring, thermal health care, and thermal robotics.