Highly Conductive Material Paste for Screen-Printing on Textiles

Purpose and goal

In this project, an elastic conductive paste has been developed using Carbon Nanotubes as conductive material. The conductivity is good enough to interconnect measurement leads with differential amplifiers inputs in biopotential recorders like ECG and HR monitoring devices. The elasticity is over 25% allowing to be used in most textile materials.

Results and expected effects

Initially we expected, to obtain a conductive paste to be used to incorporate any kind of electronic circuitry on a garment. This way the integration of textile and electronics would facilitated. The obtained past, it is good enough for specific applications requiring connectivity but not metallic conductivity. Actually, Textile-Electronic interconnection still is a challenging issue for manufacturing, therefore we expected that obtained material and the designed process will be efficient enough to be developed further into a true manufacturing process of interconnectors

Approach and implementation

Once implemented the project, we realised that this project would probably required a few more months, probably a total of 9, to have achieve the expected results. Maybe by skipping the time dedicate to work on the carbon nanotubes, we could have invested such time on developing the paste based in silver all the way through funcional success, we could have developed the highly conductive e-paste.