Continuous Wet-Spinning of TPU Composite Fibers for Wearable Knitted Sensors

With the remarkable development of wearable and smart textiles, especially elastomeric conductive fibers, have recently aroused unprecedented attention from academia and industry. However, aggregates are likely to form in the internal network of elastomeric fibers as a result of the intrinsic hydrophobicity of different conductive nanocomposites, which profoundly affects their sensing performance and seriously limits their large-scale production. Herein, PDA-decorated CNT-DMPA@TPU composite fibers with rGO and AgNPs (PCTR-Ag) are prepared via a scalable wet-spinning approach based on the chain-interlocked structure and remarkable interfacial interactions. The incorporation of PDA facilitates the dispersion of rGO nanocomposites in the TPU matrix by molecular dynamics simulations. Reasonably designed rGO nanocomposites impart outstanding electrical performances with wonderful sensing properties (gauge factor = 3845.2), with rapid response (292 ms) within a large deformation range (1–600%), and excellent electrical transport to PCTR-Ag composite fibers. Meanwhile, PCTR-Ag composite fibers are successfully knitted on the knitting machine to comprehensively detect joint movement signals, indicating their further promising application in wearable movement detection. More importantly, the knitted fabric displays exceptional stability under different deformations, remarkable electromagnetic interference shielding, and brilliant durability over 6000 cycles (at a strain of 160%).