ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTIVE SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPOSITE FIBERS: PREPARATION, PROPERTIES AND POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS

Wangcheng Liu

doi:10.7273/000004635

The development of smart E-textiles can find important applications in next-generation sportswear, personal electronic devices, and biomedical products. Electrical conductive fibers are an essential component in smart E-textiles. Since conventional polymers for textiles are non-conductive, introducing conductive materials as fillers is a common technique used to produce conductive fibers. Typically, conductive fillers and conventional polymers are homogeneously blended to form composite blend fibers. However, in solution-based processing (e.g., electrospinning and wet-spinning), it is challenging to design the composition of homogeneous blends to achieve desired processability, mechanical properties, and electrical conductivity simultaneously. In this project, we developed a new processing technique to fabricate conductive composite fibers with a heterogeneous side-by-side (SBS) structure. The engineering principle was to apply a specially designed nozzle to combine a conventional polymer solution and a polymer/filler blend solution in an SBS manner, so the conventional polymer serves as the substrate to provide processability and mechanical flexibility for the fiber, and the polymer/filler blends contribute to electrical conductivity and other functionalities. The key to success of the project was the proper design and control of various processing factors (e.g., solution properties and processing parameters) to build good interfacial bonding between the two phases of SBS fibers. Using several conventional polymers (polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP), polyethylene oxide (PEO), polyacrylonitrile (PAN), and cotton cellulose), and one conductive polymer polyaniline (PANI) that functioned as conductive fillers, as examples, we systematically studied the process-structure-property relationships of these SBS fibers. Through comprehensive characterizations and analysis, the results showed that we had successfully produced PANI-based heterostructured fibers with decent performance that would be subjected to potential smart E-textile applications. For electrospinning, we utilized the Y-shape nozzle to create the SBS fiber structure with good interfacial bondings. For wet-spinning, we applied an eccentric nozzle with a conical tip to fabricate SBS fibers with co-continuous architecture, integrating good mechanical properties from neat conventional polymer and high conductivity from the PANI-riched blends along the fiber length. Moreover, we identified some important processing controls (e.g., viscosity difference) that influenced the geometry and interfacial bondings, creating different structural configurations that further impacted fiber performance and functionality.

ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTIVE SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPOSITE FIBERS: PREPARATION, PROPERTIES AND POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS

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