Continuous Wet-Spinning of TPU Composite Fibers for Wearable Knitted Sensors

With the remarkable development of wearable and smart
textiles,
especially elastomeric conductive fibers, have recently aroused unprecedented
attention from academia and industry. However, aggregates are likely
to form in the internal network of elastomeric fibers as a result
of the intrinsic hydrophobicity of different conductive nanocomposites,
which profoundly affects their sensing performance and seriously limits
their large-scale production. Herein, PDA-decorated CNT-DMPA@TPU composite
fibers with rGO and AgNPs (PCTR-Ag) are prepared via a scalable wet-spinning
approach based on the chain-interlocked structure and remarkable interfacial
interactions. The incorporation of PDA facilitates the dispersion
of rGO nanocomposites in the TPU matrix by molecular dynamics simulations.
Reasonably designed rGO nanocomposites impart outstanding electrical
performances with wonderful sensing properties (gauge factor = 3845.2),
with rapid response (292 ms) within a large deformation range (1–600%),
and excellent electrical transport to PCTR-Ag composite fibers. Meanwhile,
PCTR-Ag composite fibers are successfully knitted on the knitting
machine to comprehensively detect joint movement signals, indicating
their further promising application in wearable movement detection.
More importantly, the knitted fabric displays exceptional stability
under different deformations, remarkable electromagnetic interference
shielding, and brilliant durability over 6000 cycles (at a strain
of 160%).