Herein, we develop a novel method to fabricate silver conductive patterns on polyester fabric (PET) by screen printing dopamine (DOPA) tracks first, then reducing silver ions with polydopamine (PDA) tracks, which are self-polymerized from dopamine (DOPA), and finally electroless plating. Polydopamine (PDA) definitely adheres to the surface of the fabric and reduces the silver ions to initiate the electroless plating. This process is confirmed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The conductivity of the well-defined silver patterns on the PET fabric is 0.86 Ω sq. In addition, the electronic patterns fabricated via the proposed method maintains their function under cyclic bending and Scotch®-tape tests, which indicates their great potential for application in flexible devices and wearable electronics.

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A two-step method was developed in this article to fabricate conductive silver-plated cotton fabrics, imparting them with antibacterial and electromagnetic shielding properties. Cotton fabric was firstly functionalized by a spontaneous polymerization of dopamine, which acted as an activation and adsorption layer to initiate the following silver plating through the catechol and indole functional groups. The chemical composition of the functional cotton fabric was investigated by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and the surface morphology of the fabric was observed by scanning electron microscopy. The crystalline structure of the silver-coated cotton fibers was characterized by power X-ray diffraction, and thermogravimetric analysis of the fabric was also studied to show thermal stability. The homogeneous silver plating was highly conductive with surface resistance about 23.55 mΩ sq. −1 and shielding effectiveness was about 55~95 dB. It also demonstrated excellent and durable antibacterial property against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli both with reduction percent of bacteria over 99.99%. All of above features made this silver-plated cotton fabrics a promising candidate as multifunctional textiles.

The tensile properties, high-cycle fatigue properties, fracture surface morphologies, corresponding damage mechanisms, and dislocation patterns of two steels with trace silicon, 550TG and SD320, are investigated. It is found that the SD320 has a higher tensile strength than 550TG, but lower plasticity. In general, some deep cracks appear along the direction of rolling in all the tensile specimens and the fatigue limit of SD320 is higher. In particular, the 550TG shows a continuously decreasing S-N characteristic without fatigue limit at the higher cycle region, which can be explained by their differences of dislocation morphologies. Furthermore, the tensile and fatigue damage mechanisms are deeply analyzed and discussed.