MXene Functionalized Kevlar Yarn via Automated, Continuous Dip Coating
Lingyi Bi1,2, William Perry1, Ruocun (John) Wang1, Robert Lord1, Tetiana Hryhorchuk1, Alex Inman1, Oleksiy Gogotsi3, Vitaliy Balitskiy3, Veronika Zahorodna3, Ivan Baginskiy3, Stepan Vorotilo1, Yury Gogotsi1*
1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and A. J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
2 Center for Functional Fabrics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
3 Materials Research Center, Kyiv 03680, Ukraine
The rise of the Internet of Things has spurred extensive research on integrating conductive materials into textiles to turn them into sensors, antennas, energy storage devices, and heaters. MXenes, owing to their high electrical conductivity and solution processability, offer an efficient way to add conductivity and electronic functions to textiles through simple dip coating. However, manual development of MXene-coated textiles restricts their quality, quantity, and variety. Here, a versatile automated yarn dip coater tailored for producing continuously high-quality MXene-coated yarns and conducted the most comprehensive MXene-yarn dip coating study to date is developed. Compared to manual methods, the automated coater provides lower resistance, superior uniformity, faster speed, and reduced MXene consumption. It also enables rapid coating parameter optimization, resulting in a thin Ti3C2 coating uniform over a 1 km length on a braided Kevlar yarn while preserving its excellent mechanical properties (over 800 MPa) and adding Joule heating and damage sensing to composites reinforced by the yarns. By dip-coating five different yarns of varying materials, diameters, structures, and chemistries, new insights into MXene-yarn interactions are gained. Thus, the automated dip coating presents ample opportunities for scalable integration of MXenes into a wide range of yarns for diverse functions and applications.
In summary, we designed and built a customized automated yarn dip coater for developing MXene-coated yarns, which can also be used for layer-by-layer coating and application of other nanomaterials.The dip coater enabled acomprehensive parametric study of MXene coating on braided Kevlar yarns and helped find the optimal combinations of MXene concentration, flake size, and drawing speed for strain sensing and Joule heating functions. Our high-throughput dip coater enables the production of a vastlibrary of MXene-functionalized conductive yarns exhibiting diverse physical, electrical, and mechanical properties at low costand high quality. As a result, we anticipate that this developmentwill expedite the research and commercialization of MXene dip-coated yarns for electronic textile applications
Read more: L. Bi, W. Perry, R. J. Wang, R. Lord, T. Hryhorchuk, A. Inman, O. Gogotsi, V. Balitskiy, V. Zahorodna, I. Baginskiy, S. Vorotilo, Y. Gogotsi, MXene Functionalized Kevlar Yarn via Automated, Continuous Dip Coating. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2023, 2312434. https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202312434
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