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Nano Research 2020, 13(10): 2879-2884 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2947-x
Research Article | Issue | Published: 05 October 2020

Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles

Show Author's Information Hong-Wu Zhu,  Huai-Ling Gao,  Hao-Yu Zhao,  Jin Ge,  Bi-Cheng Hu,  Jin Huang,  Shu-Hong Yu( )
Division of Nanomaterials & Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Institute of Energy, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
Keywords:
silver nanowires, electronic textiles, washability, printable elastic conductor, phase inversion
Topics:
Silver
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Zhu H-W, Gao H-L, Zhao H-Y, et al. Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles. Nano Research, 2020, 13(10): 2879-2884. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2947-x
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Abstract Full text Electronic supplementary material About this article

Printable elastic conductors promote the wide application of consumable electronic textiles (e-textiles) for pervasive healthcare monitoring and wearable computation. To assure a clean appearance, the e-textiles require a washing process to clean up the dirt after daily use. Thus, it is crucial to develop low-cost printable elastic conductors with strong adhesion to the textiles. Here, we report a composite elastic conductor based on Ag nanowires (NWs) and polyurethane elastomer. The composite could be dispersed into ink and easily printed onto textiles. One-step print could form robust conductive coatings without sealing on the textiles. Interestingly, the regional concentration of Ag NWs within the polyurethane matrix was observed during phase inversion, endowing the elastic conductor with a low percolation threshold of 0.12 vol.% and high conductivity of 3,668 S·cm-1. Thanks to the high adhesion of the elastic conductors, the resulted e-textiles could withstand repeated stretching, folding, and machine washing (20 times) without obvious performance decay, which reveals its potential application in consumable e-textiles.


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Electronic supplementary material
About this article

Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles

Show Author's information Hong-Wu Zhu, Huai-Ling Gao, Hao-Yu Zhao, Jin Ge, Bi-Cheng Hu, Jin Huang, Shu-Hong Yu( )
Division of Nanomaterials & Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Institute of Energy, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China

Abstract

Printable elastic conductors promote the wide application of consumable electronic textiles (e-textiles) for pervasive healthcare monitoring and wearable computation. To assure a clean appearance, the e-textiles require a washing process to clean up the dirt after daily use. Thus, it is crucial to develop low-cost printable elastic conductors with strong adhesion to the textiles. Here, we report a composite elastic conductor based on Ag nanowires (NWs) and polyurethane elastomer. The composite could be dispersed into ink and easily printed onto textiles. One-step print could form robust conductive coatings without sealing on the textiles. Interestingly, the regional concentration of Ag NWs within the polyurethane matrix was observed during phase inversion, endowing the elastic conductor with a low percolation threshold of 0.12 vol.% and high conductivity of 3,668 S·cm-1. Thanks to the high adhesion of the elastic conductors, the resulted e-textiles could withstand repeated stretching, folding, and machine washing (20 times) without obvious performance decay, which reveals its potential application in consumable e-textiles.

Keywords: silver nanowires, electronic textiles, washability, printable elastic conductor, phase inversion

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Publication history
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Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 21 May 2020
Revised: 14 June 2020
Accepted: 20 June 2020
Published: 05 October 2020
Issue date: October 2020

Copyright

© Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51732011, 21431006, 21761132008, 81788101, and 11227901), the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21521001), Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) (No. QYZDJ- SSW-SLH036), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2014CB931800), and the Users with Excellence and Scientific Research Grant of Hefei Science Center of CAS (No. 2015HSC-UE007). This work was partially carried out at the Center for Micro and Nanoscale Research and Fabrication, University of Science and Technology of China.

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