Continuous and freeform manufacturing of hybrid laser-induced graphene and polyimide woven fabrics for enabling smart-textile garments with multifunctional wearable applications
Yajie Hu, Pingping Hao, Boru Du, Yan Gao, Weixiong Yang, Mingguang Han, Zhuang Hao, Haibin Duan, Xilun Ding, Sida Luo
Abstract
Laser-induced graphene (LIG) enabled smart textiles are becoming a novel type of flexible electronics, but restricted from large-scale and large-size manufacturing. Herein, a brand-new strategy of smart textiles is proposed for swift, continuous and freeform manufacturing of hybrid LIG and polyimide (PI) fabrics with length reaching 10 m and surface area achieving 3 m 2 . It is found out that the woven precursor with considerable void space is the key to maximally guarantee the converted LIG with best structural-planeness and performance-uniformity, by consistently showing <5 % variation of sheet resistance regardless of laser fluence (from 35.3 to 88.8 J/cm 2 ) and processing dimension (from 1 to 30,000 cm 2 ). With unique manufacturing features along with optimizable properties and performances, a LIG/PI fabric enabled smart jacket and multiple smart apparels are finally designed to systematically demonstrate multimodal wearable applications, including physiologic sensing, motion monitoring, liquid detecting, body heating, triboelectric illuminating and fire alarming.