Data from Investigation and Improvement of the Dispenser Printing of Electrical Interconnections for Smart Fabric Applications

This data underlies the paper ‘Investigation and Improvement of the Dispenser Printing of Electrical Interconnections for Smart Fabric Applications’ published in ‘Smart Materials and Structures’. Electrical interconnections are essential for the integration of electronic functions in a fabric. These interconnects can be dispenser printed on a fabric; however printing directly on a breathable woven fabric surface is challenging due to the high surface variation and porosity defined by the weave. This paper shows that fabric surface variation leads to inconsistent printed structures which adversely affects the electrical properties of printed conductive tracks. It uses a novel thermal imaging based method for resistance distribution analysis of the printed conductive tracks. This paper also investigates a solution of overcoming the fabric variation in the form of dispenser printing an interface layer between the conductive ink and the fabric surface. Four dielectric inks DuPont 5018, Electra EFV4/4965, Fabinks-UV-IF-1004 and Fabinks-UV-TC0233, evaluated in this paper as interface materials, reduce the fabric surface variation by more than 95%. Conductive tracks, dispenser printed on the four interface materials, produced ?90% reduction of electrical resistivity compared to tracks printed directly on the fabric. Tracks using this method produced similar resistivity to dispenser printed tracks on Kapton, a traditional printed electronic substrate. Details of dispenser printing of interface materials reported in this paper can be used for the fabrication of uniform electronic layers in smart fabric applications.