Wet-Spun Side-by-Side Electrically Conductive Composite Fibers

Electrically conductive fibers play an important role in smart electronic textiles to connect the key components of a smart system, convey energy, and sometimes serve as a sensor. Polymers for traditional fibers are insulating. Incorporating conductive fillers to produce blend fibers is a common method to produce conductive flexible fibers. In the filler/polymer blend system, increasing the filler load enhances fiber conductivity but that adversely affects fiber processability and deteriorates the fiber mechanical performance. In this study, an innovative wet spinning technique was used to manufacture heterostructured polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and polyaniline (PANI) conductive fibers. A PAN/PANI blend solution was co-spun with a neat PAN solution to produce side-by-side (SBS) fibers. The results showed that, by employing the SBS technique, PAN/PANI solutions of high PANI load that were not spinnable by themselves could be co-spun into SBS fibers with neat PAN. The SBS fibers maintained a similar level of conductivity to the fibers produced from the PAN/PANI blend solution only, although the overall PANI load in the SBS fiber was much lower. Additionally, the SBS fibers exhibited superior mechanical performance with the neat PAN serving as a substrate. The study demonstrated a manufacturing technique to produce conductive polymer composite fibers for e-textiles.

Automated summary

This study presents an innovative wet spinning technique to produce conductive fibers by co-spinning a polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and polyaniline (PANI) blend solution with a neat PAN solution. The resulting side-by-side (SBS) fibers exhibit high conductivity and superior mechanical performance, making them suitable for electronic textiles.