Bio-inspired Fabrication of Cu-Ni Coatings onto Mercerized Flax Fabric by Electroless Plating

This research mainly prepared a bio-friendly electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding fabric, and discussed the influence of the grammage (i.e. 120 g/m(2), 160 g/m(2) and 210 g/m(2), etc) of fabric substrate on the preparation of metal-based EMI shielding conductive fabric by electroless plating. A series of steps involved mercerization, dopamine (DoPA) modification, Ni0 seeding and electroless copper-nickel (Cu-Ni) plating were carried out to fabricate ideal EMI shielding fabric. The prepared Cu-Ni fabric endowed relatively high EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) (34.80-42.00 dB) ranging from 30 to 4500 MHz, which made it a huge potential in the field of wearable EMI shielding. Moreover, another discovery was that a relative higher grammage may lead to a lower total metal loading. Furthermore, Fourier transformation infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements were conducted to verify the introduction of functional groups in mercerization, modification and activation procedures. The crystalline phases and morphologies of resulting Cu-Ni coatings were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and field emission-scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) measurements. The atomic ratio (at.%) of Cu and Ni in the sample was determined by Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX) measurements. Overall, the Cu-Ni alloy fabric prepared in this research met the requirements of health, coating lining and EMI shielding.