Design and Development of Copper Core Conductive Fabrics for Smart Textiles

Today wearable electronics are playing a vital role in many applications such as military, medical application, telecommunications, and health care garments. Conductive textiles are also providing wide range of applications in areas of civilian and military purposes. In this research work, an attempt has been made to design and develop core—sheath conductive yarns with copper filament as core and cotton as sheath using Dref-3 friction spinning system. The special guide mechanism has been designed and used to produce uniform structure of core—sheath conductive yarns. Three different core—sheath ratios such as 67/33, 80/20, and 90/10 respectively, were produced by varying the draft in the second drafting unit, which fed the cotton carded slivers to cover the core component. Copper filament of 38 SWG British Standard Gauge has been used as core component. The nominal yarn linear density of core conductive yarn (CCY) produced in this research was 328 tex and core component kept as constant 261 tex for all the yarn samples. The copper CCY were used to develop the conductive fabrics. These fabrics have very good scope for many applications for development of electromagnetic shielding wearable textiles, mobile phone charging, and body temperature sensing garments. The electro-mechanical characteristics of the copper CCY and fabrics have been studied.