Monday, 30 May 2022: 09:30
West Meeting Room 116 (Vancouver Convention Center)
Wearable electronic textiles (smart textiles) combine regular clothing with materials comprising smart sensing capabilities. As such, smart textiles have been increasingly researched across multidisciplinary fields this past decade. Applications for smart fabrics include clothing that assimilate information technologies, communication, magnetic shielding, and sensors for military and healthcare monitoring. Current smart fabrics are generally bulky, heavy weight, and uncomfortable to wear due to the use of metals for sensing and electrical connections. However, electrospinning potentially offers a new way to use polymers instead of metals to create smart textiles that are much more comfortable for the user. The purpose of this study is to obtain a three-dimensional “fluffy mass” from a smart polymeric solution via electrospinning. The mass should behave similarly to a cotton ball that then could be processed through general weaving procedures to form a yarn. The yarn could then be woven into clothing. An electrospinning collector was fabricated from extrapolated dimensions from previous literature in a half-scaled model using aluminum. Along with the collector, a variable speed, low RPM motor was constructed using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts. A high throughput setup, involving one extruder and an grounded rotating collector in a vertical configuration, generated unidirectional oriented Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) fibers in a hollow casing. This same assembly has the potential to be scaled to produce smart fabrics in large quantities in short periods of time. With further experimentation such as adjustments to the motor speed and/or modifications to the collector design this study could generate an improved procedure to obtain smart materials needed for more comfortable and practical wearable electronics.