The aim of this project was to determine the economic and technical feasibility of using readily scalable technologies for the development of inexpensive and high-performance ink-jet printed, energy storage devices based on two- dimensional nanosheets for smart wearables and textile electronics.
Electronic textiles (e-textiles) have received considerable attention as the ideal platform for interactive and wearable electronic devices due to their comfortable, lightweight, and flexible nature. Wearable e-textiles are proposed to be able to perform electronic functions and are perceived as a way to add features into common wearable textiles, building competitive market advantages. Future e-textiles markets will range from medical, to transportation and energy and protection, security communication and electronics.
E-textile production has become not only a research effort but also an industrial production challenge. It is important to know how to use existing industrial processes or to develop new ones that are able to scale up production, ensuring the behavior and performance of prototypes. Compared to typical planar substrates (i.e. films or glass), textiles are a problematic substrate for electronic devices because they consists of knitted fibers with rough surfaces and porous structures. These structures severely limit the deposition of smooth and continuous electronic materials, which can result in degradation of electronic function. Moreover, textiles are extremely deformable, foldable, and sometimes stretchable according to the weave pattern and need to endure exposure to harsh conditions such as sunlight, sweat, washing and ironing. Therefore, electronic materials for e-textile applications should be flexible and durable to mechanical deformation, as well as possess a suitable function for the textile substrate.
As a critical component of e-textiles, an electrode with a designable pattern still meets great challenges from mechanical and chemical stability aspects. Some works have been reported on textile-electronics (sensors and transistors) manufactured from nanomaterials through dip-coating chemical deposition and magnetron sputtering. However, these processing methods can hardly meet the requirements of washability, pattern diversity, and time-efficient/mass production of the electrode. Ink-jet printing is also another technique that has been explored. Many electronic components, such as thermoelectric power generators, sensors, antennas and light-emitting devices, have been printed onto textiles for application in curtain lighting, self-heating seats or wearable electronics for monitoring or security purposes, such as motion sensors, health monitoring and radio-frequency communication. The realization of gesture control through e-textiles requires highly integrated sensors, which sets higher requirements for the formation of electrode patterns and power supply. In all these cases, a power supply is needed - which is usually the bottleneck in the development of smart textiles, since common power supplies are not flexible and often not lightweight, prohibiting their unobtrusive integration in electronic textiles. The development of such e-textiles is hugely shadowed by its power supply as a traditional battery is a burden for light, convenient smart-textiles.
Thi project focussed on the development of printed energy storage solutions.
