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Printable elastic silver nanowire-based conductor for washable electronic textiles Hong-Wu Zhu, Huai-Ling Gao, Hao-Yu Zhao, Jin Ge, Bi-Cheng Hu, Jin Huang, and Shu-Hong Yu () Division of Nanomaterials & Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Institute of Energy, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China © Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Received: 21 May 2020 / Revised: 14 June 2020 / Accepted: 20 June 2020

ABSTRACT Printable elastic conductors promote the wide application of consumable electronic textiles (e-textiles) for pervasive healthcare monitoring and wearable computation. To assure a clean appearance, the e-textiles require a washing process to clean up the dirt after daily use. Thus, it is crucial to develop low-cost printable elastic conductors with strong adhesion to the textiles. Here, we report a composite elastic conductor based on Ag nanowires (NWs) and polyurethane elastomer. The composite could be dispersed into ink and easily printed onto textiles. One-step print could form robust conductive coatings without sealing on the textiles. Interestingly, the regional concentration of Ag NWs within the polyurethane matrix was observed during phase inversion, endowing the elastic conductor with a low percolation threshold of 0.12 vol.% and high conductivity of 3,668 S·cm−1. Thanks to the high adhesion of the elastic conductors, the resulted e-textiles could withstand repeated stretching, folding, and machine washing (20 times) without obvious performance decay, which reveals its potential application in consumable e-textiles.

KEYWORDS printable elastic conductor, electronic textiles, washability, phase inversion, silver nanowires

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Introduction

Smart electronic textiles (e-textiles) with embedded electronic components enable pervasive healthcare, computation, and communication in our daily life [1–5]. Interconnects with good mechanical and conductive properties are the basis of integrating different electronic components. The classical fabrication methods of interconnects are plating metals on the yarns, then weaving or embroidering conductive yarns into textile, which result in limited structural stretchability [6–9]. In the meantime, printing elastic conductors onto textiles provides another fast and scalable path to fabricate highly stretchable interconnects for e-textiles [2, 3, 10–12]. The printed elastic conductors should not only have high stretchability to adapt the joints movement beyond the essential requirement of high conductivity, but also withstand repeated washing process like any other garments to assure a long-term clean appearance [7, 9]. Thus, these requirements raise the demand of developing new generations of conductive inks, the precursor of the printed elastic conductor [12]. Conductive inks which consist of conductive nanomaterial and solvents could