Metal nanowires grown in situ on polymeric fibres for electronic textiles

A key aspect of the use of conventional fabrics as smart textiles and wearable electronics is to incorporate a means of electrical conductivity into single polymer fibres. We present the transformation of thin polymer fibres and fabrics into conductive materials by in situ growth of a thin, optically transparent gold-silver nanowire (NW) mesh with a relatively low metal loading directly on the surface of polymer fibres. Demonstrating the method on poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid and nylon microfibres, we show that the NW network morphology depends on the diameter of the polymer fibres, where at small diameters (1-2 μm), the NWs form a randomly oriented network, but for diameters above several micrometers, the NWs wrap around the fibres transversally. This phenomenon is associated with the stiffness of the surfactant templates used for the NW formation. The NW-decorated fibres exhibit a significant increase in conductivity. Moreover, single fibres can be stretched up to ∼15% before losing the electrical conductivity, while non-woven meshes could be stretched by about 25% before losing the conductivity. We believe that the approach demonstrated here can be extended to other polymeric fibres and that these flexible and transparent metal-coated polymer fibres could be useful for various smart electronic textile applications.

Contact-free conductivity probing of metal nanowire films using THz reflection spectroscopy

We utilize time-domain Terahertz (THz) reflectivity measurements for characterizing the surface conductivity of Polyethylene-terephthalate coated with nanowire (NW) films to form novel transparent electrodes (TE). We find good correspondence between the film conductivity and the THz-field reflectivity that provide uniquely desirable means for non-destructive, contactless conductivity measurements of large area NW-based-TEs. We demonstrate the robustness of THz reflectivity measurements to deviations invoked on NW film composition and film uniformity. The dependence of THz reflectivity on area NW coverage follows an anisotropic effective medium model for the dielectric constant.