Enhancing the electrical conductivity of stretchable silicone composite textiles using ethanol solvent treatment

Abstract

The electrical conductivity and mechanical properties of a stretchable conductive composite textile (CCT) were simply enhanced by solvent treatment with ethanol (EtOH). The proposed flexible conductive composites were prepared using a conductive silicone polymer and a stretchable fabric, wherein the EtOH solvent effectively eliminates the unreacted silicone components between the textile fibers to form a mechanically interlocking structure between silicone polymer and fabric. As a result, mechanical failure between the silicone matrix and the textile layer after repeated tensile testing was prevented to result in a high strain recovery rate of silicone-embedded CCT. After six cyclic strain recovery tests, the EtOH-treated CCT exhibited an excellent recovery rate of 79.3% and continued to maintain a high recovery rate of 70.4% even after ten cycles. Notably, even after continuous tensile loading, an extremely low electrical resistance of 3.1 omega was also retained.