Washing of Electrotextiles
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Washing of Electrotextiles Jeremiah Slade, Marty Agpaoa-Kraus, Jeremy Bowman, Andrew Riecker, Tom Tiano, Charles Carey, and Dr. Patricia Wilson, Foster-Miller, Inc. Waltham, MA 02451, U.S.A. Abstract The ability to integrate electrical functionality into textile garments is becoming increasingly desired for consumer devices, military applications and for companies with large distributed workforces. This technology has the potential to facilitate the transfer of information and increase efficiency in many arenas. One of the major hurdles that has hindered the wedding of electronics and clothing has been the need to wash the resulting garment. This paper describes a study of the long term effects of washing and drycleaning electrotextile elements. Introduction The field of Electro-Textiles integrates conductive fiber and fabric materials with more traditional textile elements to create innovative and functional wearable products. Examples of such materials include thin foiled or directly plated metal fibers, metallic yarns, metal-coated fabrics and metal woven fabrics. These materials can be combined together to form unique products that provide functions such as electronic shielding, power transfer, data transmission and communications capabilities. The end products not only need to function as designed electrically, but must also exhibit superior flexibility, enhanced wearability, and the ability to withstand multiple washing environments. In an effort to maximize the life expectancy of products integrated with these materials, a continuing study to understand the effects of cleaning after handling and use is presented here. This study examines the long term electrical behavior of conductive narrow wovens and fabrics commonly used in electro-textiles as a function of both machine washing and dry cleaning. Sample Selection and Preparation Narrow Woven Electro-Textiles: Based on earlier wash testing at our facility, two different conductive yarns were chosen. These yarns were representative of many conductive textiles and had been shown to be good candidates. The first was an Ag-Cu metal foil wrapped yarn and the second was a Ni-Cu-Ag metal-coated fiber. Other metal-coated yarns and wires were found to have either no wash resistance or to be mechanically destroyed during washing. Stainless steel yarns were initially considered but were found to have little-to-no long-term variations in resistance over a 5-year product life cycle and were not tested during this study due to their excellent performance. Each of the selected fibers was woven into ribbons by C.M. Offray. Even lengths of the two woven specimens were cut, the cut edges were serged to
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prevent fraying losses, and then sewn to a larger piece of fabric. Five samples of each type were then washed. Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Conductive Fabrics: For this study, eleven different COTS fabrics were tested as shown in Table 1. For each test, a 7” by 7” portion of each fabric was cut. The edges were seamed to prevent unraveling of the fabric as i
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