Electrically Conductive Nanocomposites for Wearable Electronic Textiles

With increasing expectations from textile with functional properties, a new class of textile materials have been described under the name of “intelligent or smart textiles”. Smart textiles are defined as textile products such as fibres, filaments, yarns or fabrics etc. have active functions providing an interaction with the environment/user together with traditional textile properties. One of the functional smart textile products are electronic textiles or wearable electronics which its application is vast in different fields and its benefits attract most of the researches concerns. Despite of such signi?cant advancements, there is still need of stretchable, flexible and comfortable wearable electronics having electronic functions. Among various types of wearable electronics, fiber-based conductive materials are ideal for wearable electronics due to their light, durable, ?exible, foldable and comfortable structure. Conductive fibrous materials are obtained by conductive polymer, metal, carbon, piezoelectric materials, or conventional ?bers surface modi?ed with various functional materials. Among various carbon materials, graphene, carbon nanotubes, and carbon black are the most intensively explored carbon allotropes in materials science and have been well researched as alternatives to conventional materials, such as conductive polymers and metallic nanomaterials used in flexible electronics. In this study, it is aimed to obtain flexible and conductive fibrous structure by electrospinning method through the addition of synergistic carbon black (CB) and graphene bifillers to polyurethane matrix. The combination of two type conductive fillers is preferred to construct distinct conductive network morphology on the basis of synergistic effect compared with the sensing behaviour of single filler. In the study, morphological and chemical properties of electrospun composite nanofibers are evaluated by SEM and FT-IR, respectively. Additionally, electrical properties of the samples are measured by two-point analysis method using Fluke instrument and resistance values are obtained. Fibrous conductive composite structures produced as in this study may find usage areas such as human motion detection, communication facilities, data transfer, robotics and many other applications.