Knitting Elastic Conductive Fibers of MXene/Natural Rubber for Multifunctional Wearable Sensors

Abstract

Wearable electronic sensors have recently attracted tremendous attention in applications such as personal health monitoring, human movement detection, and sensory skins as they offer a promising alternative to counterparts made from traditional metallic conductors and bulky metallic conductors. However, the real-world use of most wearable sensors is often hindered by their limited stretchability and sensitivity, and ultimately, their difficulty to integrate into textiles. To overcome these limitations, wearable sensors can incorporate flexible conductive fibers as electrically active components. In this study, we adopt a scalable wet-spinning approach to directly produce flexible and conductive fibers from aqueous mixtures of Ti3C2Tx MXene and natural rubber (NR). The electrical conductivity and stretchability of these fibers were tuned by varying their MXene loading, enabling knittability into textiles for wearable sensors. As individual filaments, these MXene/NR fibers exhibit suitable conductivity dependence on strain variations, making them ideal for motivating sensors. Meanwhile, textiles from knitted MXene/NR fibers demonstrate great stability as capacitive touch sensors. Collectively, we believe that these elastic and conductive MXene/NR-based fibers and textiles are promising candidates for wearable sensors and smart textiles.