Electronic or conductive textiles have attracted particular attention because of their potential applications in the fields of energy storage, supercapacitors, solar cells, health care devices, etc. Contrary to solid materials, the properties of textile materials such as stretchability, foldability, washability, etc. make the textiles ideal support materials for electronic devices. Therefore, in recent years, various conductive materials and production methods have been researched extensively to make the textiles conductive. In the present study, an alternative method based on imparting the conductivity to the fiber-based structure for the production of conductive textiles was established. Considering the contribution of unique characteristics of the fiber-based structure to the clothing systems, imparting the conductivity to the fibrous structure before yarn and fabric production may help to protect the breathable, lightweight, softness, deformable and washable of textile structure, and hence to improve the wearability properties of the electronic textiles. In the study, carbon black nanoparticles were selected as a conductive material due to low cost and easy procurable while cotton fiber together with other fiber types such as polyester, acrylic and viscose rayon fibers were used due to their common usage in the textile industry. In addition, various production parameters (CB concentration, feeding rate, etc.) were analyzed and the results indicated that the developed alternative method is capable to produce conductive yarns and electrical resistance of the yarns was about 94–4481 kΩ. The yarns had comparable yarn tenacity and breaking elongation properties, and still carried conductive character even after washing. In literature, there has been no effort to get conductivity in this manner and the method can be considered to be a new application for added-on or built-in future wearable electronics. Also, in the study, produced conductive yarns were used as a collector to gather the nanofibers onto the yarn to produce hybrid yarns enabling the production of functional textile products.

In this study, an innovative method consisting of electrospinning and conventional textile production techniques was built up to produce hybrid yarns enabling the production of functional textile products. The principle of the developed method is to open the twist of spun yarn, make this fibre bundle conductive for use as a collector, collect the electrospun nanofibres onto the conductive opened fibre bundle and finally twist this structure to produce hybrid yarn. To determine the feasibility of the developed method, surface morphology, chemical composition, coating features and tensile properties of the hybrid yarns were compared with that of the pure yarn and nanofibre-coated yarns produced without untwisting and retwisting processes. Test results demonstrated that untwisting process in hybrid production method provided the application of nanofibres interior structure of the spun yarn while retwisting process made integration of classical textile fibres and nanofibres together and hence locking the obtained yarn structure effectively. Thanks to the integrated structure, it was successful to get the yarn have the required tensile properties for weaving, knitting and other processes. Three minutes was determined as the optimum coating time for the effective nanofibre deposition and tensile properties. Summing up the results, it was believed that the method helps to benefit from the special properties of nanofibres for the functional yarn production together with durability and higher tensile properties of the spun yarns for larger usage areas. The presented findings could encourage the researchers to commercialize the method in order to get nanofibre-coated functional yarns.