A Study of Electromechanical Behaviors of Printed Conductive Leads on Stretchable Textiles for Smart Clothing

Smart clothing with electronic functionality is gaining greater recognition as the next-generation electronics. The integration of electronics into textiles, aided by developments of materials and fabrication technologies, has paved the way to the realization of smart clothing that exhibits diverse electronics functionalities. Lamination of printed electronics into textiles, printing conductive inks on polymeric interface layers, and embedding of electronic components via molding techniques have been studied, but less attention has been paid to the viability of direct printing on textiles. In the present study, a meandering structure was directly printed on a knitted fabric with general-purpose and stretchable Silver (Ag) conductive inks. The electromechanical behavior of printed conductive leads was investigated by in-situ monitoring of DC electrical resistance during stretch-to-failure and fatigue cycling tests under uniaxial tensile loading. The influence of the printed leads on the inherent mechanical properties of the fabric was analyzed with respect to Young's modulus and deformation of the substrate under tensile strain.