Symposium SB10: New E-Textile Materials and Devices for Wearable Electronics
December 07, 2022
Felice Torrisi, Imperial College London
Two-Dimensional Field-Effect Heterostructures for Wearable and Textile Electronics
Written by Henry Quansah Afful
Wearable electronics are required to be, amongst other things, highly stretchable, biocompatible, and washable. Considering all these requirements, textiles are the most optimal substrates being used for these electronics. Employing two-dimensional (2D) material inks such as graphene and other layered materials for the electronic circuit design reduces the cost of production. These 2D materials show a lot of promise in tunability and multifunctionality. Using microfluidic exfoliation, graphene platelets can be obtained from graphite and the aspect ratio of these platelets can be tuned to have corresponding changes in electrical conductivity. In addition, bandgaps of the wearable electronics can be tuned by designing layered materials. Felice Torrisi demonstrated an inkjet printing approach for printing graphene oxide on a cotton substrate. The surface of the cotton was modified with cations to develop a positive charge whereas that of the graphene oxide ink was negatively charged. This was found to improve the adhesion of the ink on the cotton substrate considerably, resulting in stable electronic properties over 20 wash cycles. In addition, Torrisi showed how cotton wool could be mixed with graphene ink to produce graphene-cotton fiber via a wet-spinning approach. This significantly improved the flexibility of graphene.