Conductive Fabrics and their Application in Technical Textiles via Arduino Uno Microcontroller

Abstract

In recent years, wearable technology has become an ever-growing phenomenon with its applications in health, sensor, defense and daily life. It is possible to obtain textile materials with conductive properties by inserting carbon or metals such as silver, nickel and steel to  their structure, in the form of wires, fibers, and micro or nanoparticles. Electrically conductive yarns having a multifilament core are made  up of a number of electrically conducting filaments or wrapping around the multifilament core. Conductive textile materials can  protect against incendiary discharge or electromagnetic waves at frequencies that may be harmful to health as well as help prevent  charge accumulation on devices. In this research work, PP base conductive yarn and fabrics are used and their conductive characteristic  and sensing properties were studied. Arduino Uno microcontroller was used to detect the electrical behavior of e-textiles. The experiment  result revealed that, in electro-textile circuits, analog values were recorded and must be converted to digital values using a  mechanism called analog-to-digital (AD) converter. Arduino has an AD converter by default, which can read analog voltages (0V-5V) and  convert them into digital values (0- 1023). Arduino microcontrollers integrated with conductive yarn and fabrics were supported in an  analog input to read various voltages in the etextile. Analog inputs enable the microprocessor to read the state of electronic textiles that  change gradually and were recorded 2.03V for conductive yarn and 1.85V for conductive fabrics. Therefore, the developed conductive  yarns and fabrics can be considered to be a new application in the technical textiles such as smart clothing, heating, health sensor,  transport of electrical signals, protection from electrostatic discharge and electromagnetic interference.