What Are The Commercially Available Electronic Smart Textiles?

Electronic smart textiles are new textiles developed on the basis of electronic technology, such as sensing, communication, artificial intelligence and other high-tech means applied to textile technology.

The development of electronic smart textiles began with astronaut garments. Now it has been extended to the fields of national defense and security systems, health care, sports health and other consumer textiles, and its commercial applications are increasingly widespread, mainly including sports and health monitoring, electroluminescence / heating, energy harvesting and other fields.

Intelligent textiles for sports and health monitoring

The biggest advantage of wearable health monitoring system is that it can carry out uninterrupted real-time monitoring over a long period of time.

At present, various textile sensors have been used to monitor various health signals.

For example, the famous high-end underwear brand Victoria's Secret (the secret of Vitoria) released an intelligent sports bra, built-in heart rate belt, which can monitor the heartbeat of wearers. In 2016, Canada Hexoskin launched its new smart sports vest called "personal data lab", which can monitor heart rate, respiration, activity intensity and other data, and can provide users with data on physical training, sleep and daily activities.

Electroluminescent intelligent textiles

At present, the commercialized electroluminescent textiles are mainly based on 4 materials: light-emitting diodes, flexible organic light-emitting diodes, polymer optical fibers and light-emitting polymers.

Light emitting diode (LED) has the advantages of high efficiency, long service life, no breakage, fast reaction speed and high reliability. The traditional light source can not be achieved. By embedding LED into the yarn, it can be made into single color and color luminous textile yarn.

Flexible organic light emitting diodes (OLED) have natural advantages in flexible devices, and are important technologies in the field of wearable smart devices.

At present, Samsung smart phone, apple smart watch and so on have been used in this technology; our country's first generation of six generation flexible display screen production line was also put into operation in June 2018, the production of full flexible display can achieve bending, folding, curling, and curling radius is small, widely used in smart wear, mobile phones, tablet computers and other products, as well as intelligent pportation, sports fashion, building decoration, robotics, office education and other industries.

Polymer optical fiber (POF) is made of high pparent polymer material and can be applied in intelligent luminous clothing.

The application of light-emitting polymers in smart clothing is still in the research stage.

For example, CSEM (Swiss electronics and Micro Technology Center) and the precision fabric supplier Sefar jointly designed a light-emitting polymer based fabric electrode. The flexible and pparent fabric electrode can be produced in low cost coil to roll (R2R) process. The wire in the fabric substrate has high conductivity, which ensures that the electrode has high conductivity at a long distance.

Electrically heated intelligent textiles

At present, commercially applied textile heating systems consist mainly of metal wire and metal coated fiber heating system, fiber heating system with conductive filler, conductive polymer fiber heating system and carbon fiber heating system.

Heating clothing is widely used in the market.

For example, the Ardica heating jacket uses lithium ion batteries to heat the conductive fibers to keep the wearers warm 3~8 h; the warmX heating underwear adopts the silver fiber heating system, and the lithium ion rechargeable battery can be used for 2.5 to 5.5 h; in addition, the American Columbia (Columbia) heating coat, the Venture heating coat and the heating shoulder treatment pad and other products also use different kinds of conductive fibers to generate heat.

The common feature of these products is that they are equipped with heating pad, automatic 30 min safety timer and personalized temperature controller.

Energy harvesting smart textiles

The energy collection of intelligent textiles mainly consists of 3 ways: photovoltaic energy collection, piezoelectric energy harvesting and friction energy collection.

At present, commercially available flexible solar cell photovoltaic energy harvesting products include Eclipse Solar Gear solar backpack, Tommy Hilfiger solar jackets and so on.

Piezo Films Kureha pioneered the commercialized application of the first piezoelectric film, and its developed KF Piezo uses a unique crystalline polyvinylidene fluoride (KF polymer) with excellent piezoelectric properties.

In addition, Carnegie Mellon University invented the piezoelectric energy collection insoles Solepower in Pennsylvania, which has a piezoelectric energy harvesting system inside the insoles, allowing electricity to be stored in batteries outside the shoes. The 1 h Electric footage can provide 2.5 h of mobile phone charging.

The friction energy collection of smart textiles is still in the research stage.

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea have demonstrated a flexible friction nano generator (WTNG) with high power generation capability.

The polymethylsiloxane (PDMS) is based on Zinc Oxide (ZnO) nanorods and silver coated fabrics, which produce friction energy when rubbing each other.