Highly Flexible, Durable, Thermally Stable Multi-Functional Carbon Fabric Applications for Wearable Electronics

Abstract

In recent years, wearable heaters have attracted widespread attention for applications in personal heating systems and healthcare management, such as thermotherapy of textiles/clothing. In addition, flexible gas sensors are important components of wearable electronic devices used for human safety and healthcare applications. However, the current low flexibility and poor stability of the materials limit their use. In this paper, among various textile materials, the carbon fabric based high-efficiency flexible heater with its own excellent conductivity, which does not contain additives from the manufacturing state, and a sensor using the same. In order to evaluate the performance of the heater, the heating temperature and power according to the applied voltage were analyzed. Also, the temperature distribution of the carbon fabric was observed using a thermal camera. The highly flexible fabric heater is based on a uniformly interconnected carbon fiber network that efficiently and quickly heats the heater with low input power. In addition, it presents a new carbon fabric gas sensor composed of pure carbon fiber itself without additives. The carbon fabric shows a sensitive response to NO2 (24.4%@5ppm) at room temperature, and with an extreme bending radius of 3mm, it shows excellent mechanical reliability against repeated deformations over 1,000 bending cycles. The carbon fabric sensors are extremely flexible and durable even after bending, providing a stable resistance to the sensor base material. The results could be attractive to development of flexible, room temperature operable fabric based wearable gas sensing platforms.