Facile fabrication of flexible and conductive AuNP/DWCNT fabric with enhanced Joule heating efficiency via spray coating route

In this paper, a flexible conductive fabric is demonstrated using double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) incorporated with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) by a facile and cost-effective spray-coating method. The electronic conduction of AuNP/DWCNT-coated textile is effectively improved. By hybridizing with AuNPs, the attachment of DWCNTs to woven fibers is more observable, as well as the nanotubes bridging to the inter-fibers, thus resulting in the increase of new current pathways. The flexibility of the fabricated textile devices was investigated, and their relative resistances were observed with a very small deviation, indicating of great bendable properties. Moreover, the electrothermal properties of the conductive fabric heaters are demonstrated at various applied voltages. The hybrid AuNP/DWCNT fabric heater exhibits excellent Joule heating performance with the reachable steady-state temperature of 59 degrees C under an input voltage of 9 V, superior to the pristine DWCNT textile heater with having lower steady-state temperature as of 39 degrees C. The results show that the facile and efficient method used in this work could be useful for fabricating highly conductive woven textile with the enhanced Joule heating behaviors, and further utilized as a fabric heating element in various e-textile applications.

Automated summary

In this paper, a flexible conductive fabric was fabricated using a spray-coating method with double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) to improve electronic conduction. The fabricated textile demonstrated great flexibility and excellent electrothermal properties, making it a promising heating element for e-textile applications.