Pressure responsive PET fabrics via constructing conductive wrinkles at room temperature

Abstract

Thanks to the booming development of wearable electronics, finding a facile approach to integrate electronics to textiles becomes attractive. However, many disadvantages such as trivial fabrication steps, limitations of textile substrate types and unavoidable damage to textiles’ natural properties, have hampered the development of wearable electronics. In this work, pressure responsive PET fabrics were produced through a facile fabrication of conductive PET fabrics. Firstly, fine conductive adhesives (CA) with good printing performance were prepared by utilizing alcohols-assisted dispersion to prevent Ag NPs’ aggregation tendency in waterborne polyurethane (WPU). Then, screen printing on PET fabrics and subsequently treated with solvent system that consisted diallyldimethylammonium chloride (DADMAC), dichloromethane (DCM) and ethanol to construct conductive wrinkles at room temperature. With the help of WPU’s swelling, the conductive path was generated by Ag NPs spontaneous aggregation and the as-prepared conductive PET fabrics demonstrated outstanding electric conductivity (0.01Ω·m). Finally a simple self-assembly PET fabrics pressure sensor based on the conductive PET fabrics exhibited superior performance, including the synchronous response to thumb pressing (frequency was 0.5Hz), precisely distinction current of different weights, decent bending stability, fast response (63ms) and relaxation time (23ms), simultaneously possessing advantages of low cost and facile fabrication process. Based on its superior performance, the PET fabric sensor was developed to monitor the human fist behavior at different frequency (0.25Hz and 1Hz) and its good real-time response current, meeting the potential application requirements in wearable electronics and “smart textiles” for monitoring human’s movement behavior.