Conductive textile fibres find interesting applications in technical and smart textiles. The combination of electronic components such as sensors and actuators into wearable textiles is an on-going effort in the textile R&D. These smart textiles find applications such as monitoring physiological parameters during medical treatment among patients, monitoring elderly people, or personnel working under dangerous conditions such as firemen. Conductive fibres that can be integrated into the textile fabric are of high interest, both for information transfer and for power supply. There are several reported concepts for conductive or semiconductive fibres. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are a novel class of materials with potential applications in polymers and plastics. It is well documented that CNTs can be used to make electrically conductive nanocomposites.

This presentation will discuss some recent and on-going efforts regarding the melt spinning of carbon nanotube-polypropylene blends. A commercial single wall CNT-PP master batch (15 wt-% CNT content) was used for the preparation of melt spun fibre filaments. The blends were compounded in a DSM Explore twin screw microcompounder, and further spun into a fibre by using a 0.2 to 0.4 mm spinneret. The spinning temperature was around 180 to 200 °C. The filaments were further drawn (2 – 6 times) at a temperature above the Tg of the PP used, in order to orient the polymer chains and increase crystallinity. The filament drawing was done by using twin Godget rolls, heated to a temperature above the Tg of the PP used. The filament was finally collected on cardboard bobbins.

The resulted fibre filaments were characterised regarding electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, thermal properties and microscopic morphology. The possibility to insert these fibres into fabrics will further be discussed.

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