Flexible and breathable textile-based multi-functional strain sensor for compressive sensing, electromagnetic shielding, and electrical heating

The textile-based sensors have drawn increasing attention in wearable smart electronics, owing to the comfort, breathability, and elasticity. However, the low compressive strain response range, poor thermal comfort and electromagnetic shielding performance hinder severely the application of textile-based sensors in the complex environments. To address these issues, we chose a weft-flat knitted textile with a large gap as a flexible substance, graphene nanosheets (GNS), and Ag nanowires (Ag NWs) as conductive fillers, and treated the textile with a simple dip coating strategy to obtain TPU/GNS/Ag NWs@textile (TAG@textile). The prepared TAG@textile sensor not only exhibits 90% compressive strain response range and high sensitivity (GF=9.25), but also exhibits an efficient electromagnetic shielding performance of 61.68 dB. In addition, the TAG@textile sensor has excellent Joule thermal performance (it can reach 104 °C at a low voltage of 4 V). In brief, this work integrates human motion detection, electromagnetic shielding, and electrical heating, showing a great potential in future multifunctional wearable electronic devices.