Stretchable and Designable Textile Pattern Strain Sensors Based on Graphene Decorated Conductive Nylon Filaments

Abstract

AbstractFlexible sensors with stretchable and wearable characteristics have boosted wide interest in human motion detection and physiological signal monitoring. However, the majority of current sensors suffer from the lack of seamlessly integrated with clothes substrates, hindering their applications as “real” wearable devices. Herein, a facile low‐cost and scalable continuous capillary dip coating route is employed to deposit graphene inks onto nylon filaments to obtain graphene decorated nylon conductive filaments. The filaments exhibit noticeable promotion in electrical conductivity with remarkable laundry durability, and the electrical conductivity of our filaments could be up to 6.43 and 2.78 S m−1 before and after washing 10 times, respectively. Two kinds of conventional textile formation techniques, sewing and knitting, are utilized to form various textile pattern strain sensors from the conductive filaments as the building blocks, such as the linear‐type, knitted‐loop‐type, snail‐coil‐type sewed sensors and the tubular knitted fabric sensors respectively. The textile sensors with different patterns exhibited various sensing response, the knitted‐loop‐type sensor could reach the maximum strain 45.69% while the linear‐type one arrives at 13.64%. In addition, the above strain sensors exhibit high sensitivity and repeatability when monitoring the limb movement and human breathing.