Coating of conductive yarns for electro-textile applications

Conductive yarns are used for integration of sensors and other electronic devices with textile fabrics through weaving, knitting, braiding or embroidery processes. In the lifetime of the textile also several washing cycles might occur. These processes involve rubbing which may lead to displacement of conductive fibres, causing short circuiting between the neighbouring conductive fibres. Also the textile products made with conductive fibres may have to work in the presence of water, where the exposed conductive fibres can get short circuited. In this work, an attempt has been made to protect silver-coated polyamide yarns with polypropylene (PP). This is done through wrapping the PP staple fibres around the silver-coated polyamide yarns through friction spinning and melting the PP sheath fibres in an oven. The influence of twist in the conductive yarns, amount of PP coating and the oven temperature during coating process on the tenacity, electrical insulation in the presence of water and flexibility properties of the coated yarns are studied. The PP coated yarns with plied conductive yarn in the core provide better flexibility but need higher amount of coating to provide complete electrical insulation in the presence of water as compared to those yarns with single conductive yarn in the core.