New
electrically conducting and mechanically robust fibers and
yarns are needed as building blocks for emerging textile devices.
In this work, we describe a continuous wet-spinning process for the
fabrication of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate)
(PEDOT:PSS) fibers with high electrical conductivity, excellent mechanical
properties, and moderate thermoelectric performance by including a
drawing stage in dimethyl sulfoxide. Drawing the fibers induced preferential
orientation of the polymer chains in the fiber axis direction. With
increased drawing, the room temperature electrical conductivity saturated
at approximately 2000 S cm–1. The Seebeck coefficient
was found to be rather constant with drawing. Therefore, the thermoelectric
power factor saturated with applied draw between 40 and 50 μW
m–1 K–2. The thermal conductivities
of the drawn fibers were measured between 4 and 5 W m–1 K–1 at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Although
the relatively high thermal conductivity negatively affects the ultimate
thermoelectric performance, it can be beneficial for other applications
such as in electrical interconnections. Additionally, at high draw
ratios, the Young’s moduli saturated at near 15.5 GPa with
maximum break stresses of 425 MPa. To the best of our knowledge, this
Young’s modulus is the highest reported for a PEDOT:PSS material.
Further, we investigated the degree of preferred orientation by wide-angle
X-ray scattering and found a strong correlation between the orientation
of the polymer chains along the fiber axis and the trends observed
in the fibers’ properties. In general, the fibers with the
highest orientation were also the stiffest and the most conducting
fibers. We believe these are important steps toward the continuous
fabrication of high performance PEDOT:PSS fibers to be used as building
blocks in the emerging field of electronic textiles.