College of Arts & Sciences

Melanie Huot

College of Engineering Chemical Engineering

Faculty

Mentor: Dr. Haifeng Ji Chemistry

Gregory Schwenk Co-Mentor

Conductive Ink for Fabric Application

Developing a conductive ink that can be used for textile application has grand implications for the future of wearable electronics. Possible uses of having circuits integrated in clothing include health monitoring, sending radio messages, or GPS tracking. The fabric pretreatment used in industries prior to applying ink was researched, which typically involved flattening the surface of the fabric with heat. These processes were simulated in lab using hot plates, gas flames, or iron rods heated in boiling water before application of the ink, which were used on cotton and polyester samples. The two main fabric inks used in screen-printing are plastisol and water-based ink. Where plastisol is designed to sit on top of the fabric, water-based ink directly dyes the fibers. Both were doped with silver powder at varying ratios of ink to silver to vary conductive strength and fabric-binding strength. Water-based ink doped with silver at a ratio of 1:1.5, ink to silver, proved to have the best test results, and after simulating washing and drying, was still able to maintain conductivity. For future research, more combinations of silver and ink can be investigated to compare efficiency to amount of silver.