Highly Conducting Textile Fibers for Electro-Textile Applications.

Electronic-textiles can communicate, sense, compute, and carry data both on the war zones and on the work environment. Micro electronic-textiles are relatively new and have strong innovative high value-added opportunities for the development of electronic devices in which flexibility and conformability are of importance. The combination of electronics and textiles offers a new way to fabricate flexible and conformable military and commercial wearable electronic products such as radiating antenna, components for EMI shielding, wearable computers, MP3 player incorporated musical jackets, chemical and bio-agent sensors, outdoor clothing, and electrically heated jackets. Although different types of conducting yarns are commercially available, they are relatively stiff, expensive, and difficult to solder. To overcome these drawbacks, flexible micro wires have been successfully produced using innovative methods. The developed highly conducting fine fibers can be woven, knitted, or braided to produce conductive textiles. These fine conductive wires can be mass produced at low cost using commercially available production machineries. The attention is given to scale up and optimize the fiber production process which allows producing several thousand meters of conductive micro fiber with an acceptable level of defects. The goal is to incorporate the fiber into sample textile materials to produce a commercially viable product.