Conductive fabrics based on carbon nanotube/Ti3C2Tx MXene/polyaniline/liquid metal quaternary composites with improved performance of EMI shielding and joule heating

Developing lightweight, flexible, conductive electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding textiles with highly thermal conductivity and Joule heating performance is of great urgency in the field of next generation of wearable electronics, thermal management, communication, and artificial intelligence. In this work, an effective strategy to construct conductive fabrics based on carbon nanotube (CNT)/Ti3C2Tx MXene/polyaniline (PANI)/liquid metal (LM) quaternary composite with improved performance of EMI shielding and Joule heating is proposed. Conductive fabrics decorated with CNT/Ti3C2Tx/PANI/LM (CTPLM) as the conductive slurry by a simple solution dip-coating technique demonstrate a remarkable EMI shielding efficiency (EMI SE) of 78.9 dB at the thickness of 0.27 mm as well as absorbing shielding effectiveness (SEA) of 64.4 dB in the range of 8.2–12.4 GHz. The synergistic effect of high electrical conductivity and porous structure endow CTPLM-CF textiles with significantly higher EMI SE than pristine MXene film and pure CNT layer. Moreover, EMI shielding performance can be further improved to 104.3 dB when three layer conductive fabrics are combined. At the same time, conductive textiles present superior Joule heating performance with a saturation temperature of 34.5 °C @1V, 94.3 °C @2V, and 130.2 °C @3 V after 60 s, respectively. The combination of these components could comprehensively utilize the low density of carbon materials and excellent electrical conductivity from MXene and LM, thus providing a lightweight, flexible, multifunctional conductive textiles with superior EMI shielding and efficient Joule heating capability, which is highly desired for applications in aerospace, intelligent electronics, wearable electronics, thermotherapy, and personal self-heating system in harsh environment.