<p>Functional textiles are of great interest to broad applications, including wearable electronics, catalysts, wastewater treatment, healthcare, robotics, etc. Turing advanced materials into the form of fiber and fabric are emerging as a new research area due to their unique properties, such as flexibility, breathability (with pores), and scalability (with mature production technologies). It is believed that incorporating functional materials or functionalization of textiles will revive the traditional textile industry. Here, we present a few manufacturing approaches that make fiber or fabric functional, and then these functional textiles are used for clean water, energy harvesting, and wearable sensors. Electrospinning is employed as our main fabrication method for nanofibers and nano-fabrics. Extrusion and thermal curing are used as an additive approach to coat conductive thread for piezoresistive sensor fabrication. Functionalities are introduced either through coating or hydrothermal growth of nanomaterials (e.g., ZnO nanowires). For functional nano-fabric manufacturing, we use zinc source and polymer as the base spin solution to produce nanofibers, followed by heat treatment and hydrothermal growth of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires to form hybrid functional nano-fabrics. Specifically, poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) is chosen as one main polymer for the construction of nano-fabric, due to its good chemical resistance, excellent thermal stability, high mechanical strength, and its well-recognized piezoelectric performance. In order to expand the choice of polymeric nanofiber for energy harvesting, a new piezoelectric nanomaterial, polyacrylonitrile (PAN), is also investigated. By interface engineering of the growth of ZnO nanowires, we designed a Janus nano-fabric with nanowires on the designed side. This nano-fabric exhibited a superhydrophilicity/underwater oleophobicity on ZnO nanowires side and presented hydrophobicity on the other side, which can work as a high-performance fluid diode for oil/water separation. By simply switching the side of a membrane, it can work for water removal as well as an oil-removing filter only driven by gravity. Then, we also show such nano-fabric can realize photo-degradation of rhodamine B dye in wastewater, with an efficiency of &gt;97% under UV irradiation. In order to investigate the applicability of energy harvesting, a piezoelectric nanogenerator (PENG) was constructed using the hybrid nano-fabric with PVDF or PAN as the main supporting materials and ZnO nanowires (or nanorods) as the modifier to enhance their piezoelectric performance. Various characterization techniques were used to systematically study the influence of processing parameters, materials, and underlying mechanisms. We show that the fabricated hybrid nano-fabrics have good performance for the desired applications, as well as robust mechanical properties. Noteworthy, the introduction of ZnO nanomaterials significantly boosted the piezoelectric performance by more than 200%, in comparison to the pristine polymeric PENG. Lastly, for wearable electronics, (1) we show the energy generated by PENG can be used as a sensor, and energy source to power electronics; (2) large-scale tactile sensors can be used to study human-environment interactions. We demonstrate some potential applications of nanomaterials-enabled fabrics in this work, but more other functions, such as thermoelectric, photovoltaic, self-cleaning, self-heating, and adaptive properties, should be explored to fully revolutionize the textile industry. &nbsp;</p>

Manufacturing of Functional Textiles for Clean Water, Clean Energy, and Wearable Electronics

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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