Abstract
E-textiles represent an emerging technology aiming toward the development of fabric with augmented functionalities, enabling the integration of displays, sensors, and other electronic components into textiles. Healthcare, protective clothing, fashion, and sports are a few examples application areas of e-textiles. Light-emitting textiles can have different applications: sensing, fashion, visual communication, light therapy, etc. Light emission can be integrated with textiles in different ways: fabricating light-emitting fibers and planar light-emitting textiles or employing side-emitting polymer optical fibers (POFs) coupled with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Different kinds of technology have been investigated: alternating current electroluminescent devices (ACELs), inorganic and organic LEDs, and light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs). The different device working principles and architectures are discussed in this review, highlighting the most relevant aspects and the possible approaches for their integration with textiles. Regarding POFs, the methodology to obtain side emissions and the critical aspects for their integration into textiles are discussed in this review. The main applications of light-emitting fabrics are illustrated, demonstrating that LEDs, alone or coupled with POFs, represent the most robust technology. On the other hand, OLEDs (Organic LEDs) are very promising for the future of light-emitting fabrics, but some issues still need to be addressed.
Highlights
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The conductive substrate was tested as an electrode for alternating current electroluminescent devices (ACELs) devices by depositing on top of it BaTiO3 +PDMS, ZnS:Cu+PDMS and PEDOT:PSS; a uniform blue emission was visible at 165 V and 37 kHz that was stable below 40% of strain [39]
From the results reported in this paragraph, it is evident that ACEL technology is robust enough for textile integration and high scalable deposition techniques can be employed for fabrication with the possibility of low-cost production
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Micromachines 2021, 12, 652 piezoelectric nanogenerators [7], and solar cells based on dyes [8], organic materials [9], and perovskites [10] have been successfully developed Energy storage devices such as batteries [11] and supercapacitors [12,13,14,15] have been fabricated on textiles. Flexibility, reasonable lifetimes, washability, large display areas, and low production costs are certainly the fundamental requirements for obtaining light-emitting fabrics that are competitive on the market All these aspects are discussed in this review, and the issues to solve for the future of light-emitting textiles are highlighted.
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