Preparation And Electrical Conductivity Of Carbon Nanotube Coated Fabric By Capillary Induced Self-assembly

The conductive fabric has both the conductivity of the conductive material and the flexibility of the fabric,which has very important applications in the field of intelligent wearable textiles.Due to their excellent conductivity and high carrier migration,carbon nanotubes(CNTs)are often used to compound with fabrics to prepare conductive fabrics.Such conductive fabrics not only have good conductivity,but also have strong weather resistance.Moreover,orderly alignment of CNTs can achieve the dual purpose of reducing the dosage of CNTs and improving the conductivity of materials,which is of great benefit to the conductivity and wearability of the coated fabrics.However,the method of constructing aligned carbon nanotubes presently often needs the help of external force field,which has high requirements for instruments and equipment.And it is hard to achieve on the surface of complex fabric.In this paper,a simple and direct post-finishing method was used to construct the CNTs arrays on the surface of ordinary commercial textiles,thus obtained efficient composite conductive fabrics.By means of the convective of the solution and the capillary force in the process of evaporation self-assembly,the water was pulling flowing,driving the CNTs in the water flow to form orderly alignment.(1)A highly efficient conductive fabric with aligned CNTs was successfully fabricated by capillary induced self-assembly.The dispersion state and surface functional groups of CNTs were analyzed.Results showed that the increase of polar groups on the surface was beneficial to the dispersion and stability of CNTs in water.The microstructure of CNTs s on the fabrics and the conductivity of the coated fabrics were characterized and analyzed,and the effectiveness of CNTs for the preparation of conductive fabrics was determined.(2)The microstructure of CNTs assembled at different drying temperatures was studied,and the influence of temperature on ordered assembly was analyzed.Meanwhile,the electrical conductivity of the fabrics with different microstructure of CNTs was tested and the electron conduction behavior of the CNTs on fabrics was investigated.(3)The effect of pH of dispersion on the alignment of CNTs and the conductivity of the coated fabrics was discussed,as well as the influence of different pH on functional groups of CNTs.Meanwhile,the hydration model of CNTs with water molecule was established.The vortex theory was used to study the effect of convective on the microstructure of CNTs,and the effect of assembly solution on the properties of conductive fabrics was investigated.(4)The influence of polymer and carbon nanotubes concentration in the dispersion on the alignment of CNTs and the conductivity of coated fabric was summarized.Sodium alginate(SA),a hydrophilic polymer,was used to increase the surface hydration of CNTs,for the purpose of analyzing the necessity of polymer for alignment of CNTs.The concentration of SA and CNTs in the dispersion was changed to investigate the effects of viscosity and convective on the alignment of CNTs,so as to obtain the optimum parameters of preparing the conductive fabrics.