Flexible, conductive and multifunctional cotton fabric with surface wrinkled MXene/CNTs microstructure for electromagnetic interference shielding

Although ultrathin and flexible conductive textiles are promising for smart wearable electronic devices, the seamless integration of electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding textiles, strain sensors and Joule heater is still a huge challenge. Herein, a conductive cotton fabric with cross-linked wrinkled microstructure is fabricated via a facile spray-coating approach, formed by carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as skeletons and Ti3C2Tx MXene nanosheets as stacking layers. Benefiting from the unique wrinkled microstructure, the resultant fabric exhibits high EMI shielding effectiveness (EMI SE) of 46.05 dB in the X-band at a thickness of only 138 µm. Furthermore, the specific EMI SE (SSE/t) of the resultant fabric is up to 6.71 × 103 dB cm2 g−1, significantly exceeding most of the currently reported polymeric EMI shielding materials. Due to the high electrical conductivity, the resultant fabric also displays excellent Joule heating performance (46.6 ℃ for PMC3C at the driven voltage of 2 V) and sensitive strain responses. More importantly, the resultant fabric demonstrates outstanding stability and anti-fouling property, offering a huge potential for long-term applications in harsh environments. This work provides a facile strategy to develop multifunctional EMI shielding fabric for human motion detection and personal thermal management.