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Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles

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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.

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 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

    Hong-Wu Zhu, Huai-Ling Gao, Hao-Yu Zhao, Jin Ge, Bi-Cheng Hu, Jin Huang & Shu-Hong Yu

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  1. Hong-Wu Zhu
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  2. Huai-Ling Gao
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  3. Hao-Yu Zhao
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  4. Jin Ge
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  6. Jin Huang
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  7. Shu-Hong Yu
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Correspondence to Shu-Hong Yu.

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Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles

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Zhu, HW., Gao, HL., Zhao, HY. et al. Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles. Nano Res. 13, 2879–2884 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2947-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2947-x

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