Flakes to Fabric: Graphene-Based Next Generation Wearable Electronic Textiles

Karim, Nazmul

Abstract

Wearable electronics is a hot topic at the moment due to its potential applications as portable, flexible, and stretchable human-interactive sensors, actuators, displays, and energy storage devices. Among them, smart wearable textiles have been going through significant evolutions in recent years, through the innovation of wearable electronics, and due to their miniaturization and the wireless revolution. This has resulted in personalized wearable garments that can interface with the human body and continuously monitor, collect, and communicate various physiological parameters such as temperature, humidity, heart rate, and activity monitoring. Such a platform would potentially provide a solution to the overburdened healthcare system resulting from a rapidly growing aging society, as well as maintaining and encouraging healthy and independent living for all, irrelevant of time and location. However, current technologies for wearable garments are associated with a number of challenges that other electronic technologies do not face, such as the complex and time-consuming manufacturing process of e-textiles and the use of expensive, non-biodegradable, and unstable metallic conductive materials.

Graphene-based textiles have shown promise for next generation wearable electronics applications due to its advantages over metal-based technology. We developed simple, scalable and cost-effective way of manufacturing graphene-based textiles at commercial production rates of ∼150 m/min for fabrics and (∼1000 kg/h) for electro-conductive textile yarns. The graphene textiles thus produced are washable, flexible and bendable. We then demonstrate a potential application of our graphene-based electronics textiles for multifunctional and high performance wearable electronics applications.We believe our scalable production method of producing graphene-based wearable e-textiles is an important step toward moving from R&D-based e-textiles to actual real world applications.

• Presentation Conference Type: Keynote
• Conference Name: Carbontech- 4th International Carbon Materials Conference & Exhibition
• Start Date: Nov 26, 2019
• End Date: Nov 29, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 3, 2020
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5588108