Superhydrophobic, Highly Conductive, and Trilayered Fabric with Connected Carbon Nanotubes for Energy-Efficient Electrical Heating

Abstract

Current electrically heated fabrics provide heat in cold climates, suffer from abundant wasted radiant heat energy to the external environment, and are prone to damage by water. Thus, constructing energy-efficient and superhydrophobic conductive fabrics is in high demand. Therefore, we propose an effective and facile methodology to prepare a superhydrophobic, highly conductive, and trilayered fabric with a connected carbon nanotube (CNT) layer and a titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) nanoparticle heat-reflecting layer. We construct polyamide/fluorinated polyurethane (PA/FPU) nanofibrous membranes via first electrospinning, then performing blade-coating with the polyurethane (PU) solution with CNTs, and finally fabricating FPU/TiO 2 nanoparticles via electrospraying. This strategy causes CNTs to be connected to form a conductive layer and enables TiO 2 nanoparticles to be bound together to form a porous, heat-reflecting layer. As a consequence, the as-prepared membranes demonstrate high conductivity with an electrical conductivity of 63 S/m, exhibit rapid electric-heating capacity, and exhibit energy-efficient asymmetrical heating behavior, i.e., the heating temperature of the PA/FPU nanofibrous layer reaches more than 83 °C within 90 s at 24 V, while the heating temperature of the FPU/TiO 2 layer only reaches 53 °C, as well as prominent superhydrophobicity with a water contact angle of 156°, indicating promising utility for the next generation of electrical heating textiles.

Water-Borne Photo-Thermal Superhydrophobic Coating for Anti-Icing, Self-Cleaning and Oil–Water Separation

“…Significantly, carbon black has a high light absorption coefficient and ultra-broadband absorption, showing an outstanding solar-responsive capacity [23,24]. However, large amounts of organic solvents are always involved in the hydrophobic modification for the application of self-cleaning and oil-water separation, especially, the fluorides are used as the low surface energy reagents [25,26] which catastrophically damage water and air resources.…”