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 material scan 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 thisresearch 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.