Polymer-based conductive fibers

Sammanfattning: Conductive polymers, since from their discovery, have become a prominent area of research and found many useful applications in all fields of our daily life. Examples are light emitting diodes, heat generation, chemical sensors and electro-active membranes. Polymer coated textile substrates give flexible and lightweight materials. One well utilized and thoroughly explored conductive polymer is poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) also known as PEDOT. Although there are different ways to produce PEDOT one of the most common is the VPP technique. The typical procedure when using VPP is to introduce the monomer vapor to an oxidant coated substrate so that it polymerizes on the surface of the substrate. Throughout this study, the VPP technique has been used to produce PEDOT on different textile fibers. Aim was first of all optimizing the process gaining low electric resistance, i. e. high conductivity, of produced coated fibers but also multilayer coatings of fibers. Outcome indicates some parameters not having a clear influence over the results while others had a more distinct impact. A noteworthy result was obtained by coating a substrate, namely lyocell fiber, multiple times with layers deposited directly on each other. This decreased the resistance from 5.1 (± 1.6) kΩ/10 cm to 1.0 (± 0.1) kΩ/10 cm, for one layer and multiple layers respectively. Adding 15 wt. % of the copolymer PEG-PPG-PEG to the oxidant solution decreased the resistance from 6.8 (± 1.2) kΩ/10 cm to 3.9 (± 0.8) kΩ/10 cm. Final conclusion is that among the ways, to improve conductivity for PEDOT coated fibers, applied in this study are best results obtained by multi-layer coating.