Exciting opportunities with Smart Textiles

Smart textiles and wearable technology have the potential to change the way we manage
our health, respond to emergency, communicate and entertain ourselves.
There is an increasing demand for smart fabrics and interactive textiles. The US market alone
for smart fabrics is predicted to reach $1.8 billion by 2015 according to a new report by Global
Industry Analysts, Inc.
Applications
Wearable sensors and antennas: assisted living, military,
data capture and feedback
Health and emergency: Physiological monitoring and triage
Leisure and fashion
Sports: Performance monitoring
Medical applications: Antibacterial (surgical masks,
wound dressing)
NPL Smart Textile
A unique technique has been developed at NPL (patent applied for) to coat individual fbres
to a thickness of 20 nm with silver. The resulting fabric is fexible and stretchable textile. The
conductive silver layer fully encapsulates fbres, has good adhesion, excellent conductivity
and in addition has antibacterial properties due to the presence of silver (Figures 1 & 2).
Smart Conductive Textiles
Chris Hunt, R. Ashayer-Soltani, Owen Thomas
National Physical Laboratory, Hampton Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 0LW, UK
chris.hunt@npl.co.uk
www.npl.co.uk
Advantages
Additive conductor technology for textiles
Highly conductive fabric. ( = 0.188/sq)
High level of fexibility in the fabric following metallisation.
Can be used on large areas
Can print tracks and complex designs
Good washability ~ 50 cycles with acceptable change in resistance
Stretchable fabrics retains conductivity even with stretching
Diferent metals can be used
Interconnecting pad
Conclusion
Smart textiles will play a part in the wearable
technology revolution
Conductive fabric with a lowresistivity of less than 0.2 /sq
can be fabricated
Patterning the deposit will permit circuits to be
written on textiles
Stretch nylon fabric processed using NPL technology
Polyester Lycra
The graph (left) shows the efect
of stretching on resistance on the
textile. This efect can be used as a
sensor.
Figure 1. Smart Fabric Figure 2. SEMimage of nanosilver coated fabric
Figure 3. Fabric: a) Knitted b) Woven
(a) (b)
Above: examples of modifed textiles
Knitted textiles are
stretchable (Figure 3a)
Knitting is demanding of
metal containing yarns
Additive process to apply
metal layer
10 m
200 nm
1 m