Roll-to-roll layer-by-layer assembly bark-shaped carbon nanotube/Ti3C2Tx MXene textiles for wearable electronics

Abstract

Smart wearable electronics have drawn increasing attention for their potential applications in personal thermal management, human health monitoring, portable energy conversion/storage, electronic skin and so on. However, it is still a critical challenge to fabricate the multifunctional textiles with tunable morphology and performance while performing well in flexibility, air permeability, wearing comfortability. Herein, we develop a novel roll-to-roll layer-by-layer assembly strategy to construct bark-shaped carbon nanotube (CNT)/Ti3C2Tx MXene composite film on the fiber surface. The fabricated bark-shaped CNT/MXene decorated fabrics (CMFs) exhibit good flexibility, air permeability and electrical conductivity (sheet resistance, 6.6 Ω/□). In addition, the CMFs demonstrate good electrothermal performance (70.9 °C, 5 V), electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding performance (EMI shielding effectiveness, 30.0 dB under X-Brand), and high sensitivity as the flexible piezoresistive sensors for monitoring the human motions. Importantly, our CMFs show distinctive EMI shielding mechanism, where a great proportion of incident electromagnetic microwaves are reflected by the bark-shaped CNT/MXene films owing to the multi-interface scattering effects. This work may provide a new strategy for the fabrication of multifunctional textile-based electronics and pave the way for smart wearable electronics.