Electroluminescent Fabric Woven by Ultrastretchable Fibers for Arbitrarily Controllable Pattern Display

Abstract

Flexible textile displays can be revolutionary for information transmission at any place and any time. Typically, textile displays are fabricated by traditional rigid electronics that sacrifice mechanical flexibility of devices or by flexible electronics that do not have an appropriate choice to arbitrarily control single pixels. This work reports on an electroluminescent fabric woven by ultrastretchable fibers (electroluminescent fibers up to 400% stretch, electrode fibers up to 250% stretch), which can exhibit the pixel-based arbitrarily controllable pattern display by a mobile phone application. To realize ultrastretchability, we made these fibers by encapsulating liquid metals on a polyurethane core (high elasticity). To realize arbitrary control, the design shows a plain-woven structure comprising ZnS-based electroluminescent fibers and perpendicular electrode fibers. The cross-points between the electroluminescent fiber and the electrode fiber form pixels that can be switched on or off independently and can further form the pixel-based arbitrarily controllable pattern display. By doping with different elements, ZnS-based electroluminescent fibers can emit green, blue, or yellow lights. Meanwhile, the fabrication of these fibers employs dip-coating, a scalable manufacturing method without high temperature or vacuum atmosphere. These fabrics show great potential in a wide range of applications such as wearable electronic devices, healthcare, and fashion design.

Emerging washable textronics for imminent e-waste mitigation: strategies, reliability, and perspectives

“…1f). 82 Moreover, a 3D textile with two electrodes and one spacer in a single sheet of cloth could be constructed using a weaving machine for application in dye-sensitized solar cells (Fig. 1g).…”

Multifunctional Displays and Sensing Platforms for the Future: A Review on Flexible Alternating Current Electroluminescence Devices

“…In addition, the dielectric layer is not necessary. In some studies, the overlapping area of two vertically distributed conductive fibers can also form a light emitting device. , …”

“…(b) Schematic diagram of a smart fabric with a Bluetooth switch. Reproduced with permission from ref . Copyright 2021 American Chemical Society.…”

Advances in the Robustness of Wearable Electronic Textiles: Strategies, Stability, Washability and Perspective

“…Since then, e-textiles are of great interest and have experienced disruptive innovation and advancement in terms of research and application. So far, e-textiles Nanomaterials 2022, 12, 2039 2 of 47 have been proposed to be utilized in different areas, i.e., healthcare [7,8], sensing [9,10], defense [11,12], sports [13,14], personal protection [15,16], fashion [17,18], energy [19,20], thermal management [21,22], magnetic shielding [23,24], communication [25,26], etc. The incorporation of metal nanoparticles (silver [27,28], gold [29,30], copper [31,32], zinc oxide [33,34], gallium [35,36], platinum [37,38], aluminum [39,40], nickel [41,42], cobalt [43,44], tin [45,46], etc.…”