Highly Conducting Textile Fibers for Electro-Textile Applications.

The integration of electronics functionality to the textile structures offers a new and unique way to fabricate wearable military and commercial systems that sense, communicate, compute, and carry power and data both on the battlefield and on the work environment. The textiles provide the lightweight and comfort while electrical materials provide the conductivity with secondary consideration given to properties such as flexibility. The electro-textiles with attached cables have been introduced in the past. These cable based fabrics do not exhibit intrinsic qualities of textiles and have difficulty gaining user acceptance. With technological innovations appearing in both textile and electronics, textile manufacturers are eager to introduce fabrics with embedded electronics. One major hurdle in producing these fabrics is the lack of ultra fine conductors. To date, no fine wires of 10 – 25 micron are commercialized due to many manufacturing challenges. Once these challenges are overcome, fine wires can be mass produced at low cost at relatively high production rates. One objective of this proposal is to achieve textile grade wires by means of promising processes. We suggest, with great confidence, three potential processes that will lead to successful productions of textile grade wires that are less than 25 microns (1 mil).