• Textile Coloration and Finishing
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2011

Electrically conductive yarn coated with silver particles are widely used to make smart wear but recent studies on smart fabrics are focused on measuring method of electrical characteristics and improving technologies of its electric properties. Also durability of conductive yarn with environmental change was also important work to make smart fabric. We compared resistance changes of silver coated conductive yarns under various physical and chemical conditions such as repeated strain, heat exposure and pH for basic informations on smart wear manufacturing process. And we deduct that repeated strain among the physical conditions was most effective factors on yarn resistance change and the low resistance change was observed with increasing the number of filaments in identical yarn fineness.

• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.16-30
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• 2017

Currently, e-textile market is rapidly expanding and the emerging area of e-textiles requires electrically conductive threads for diverse applications, including wearable innovative e-textiles that can transmit/receive and display data with a variety of functions. This study introduces hybrid nano-structures which may help increase the conductivity of the textile threads for use in wearable and flexible smart apparels. For this aim, Ag was selected as a conductive material, and yarn treatment was implemented where silver nanowire (AgNW) and graphene flake (GF) hybrid structures overcome the limitations of the AgNW alone. The yarn treatment includes several treatment conditions, e.g., annealing temperature, annealing time, binder material such as polyurethane (PU), coating time, in order to search for the optimum method to form stable conductive nano-scale composite materials as thin film on the surface of textile yarns. Treatedyarns showed improved electrical resistance readings. The functionality of the spandex yarn as a stretchable conductive thread was also demonstrated. When the yarn specimens were treated with colloid of AgNW/GF, relatively good electrical conductivity value was obtained. During the extension and recovery cycles of the treated yarns, the initial resistance values did not deteriorate significantly, since the network of nanowire structure with the support of GF and polyurethane stayed flexible and stable. Through this research, it was found that when one-dimensional structure of AgNW and two-dimensional structure of GF were mixed as colloids and treated on the surface of textile yarns, flexible and stretchable electrical conductor could be formed.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.713-721
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• 2010

E-textile technology has earned a great deal of interest in many fields; however, existing wearable network protocols are not optimized for use with conductive yarn. In this paper, some of the basic properties of conductive textiles and requirements on wearable personal area networks (PANs) are reviewed. Then, we present a wearable personal network (WPN), which is a four-layered wearable PAN using bus topology. We have designed the WPN to be a lightweight protocol to work with a variety of microcontrollers. The profile layer is provided to make the application development process easy. The data link layer exchanges frames in a master-slave manner in either the reliable or best-effort mode. The lower part of the data link layer and the physical layer of WPN are made of a fabric serial-bus interface which is capable of measuring bus signal properties and adapting to medium variation. After a formal verification of operation and performances of WPN, we implemented WPN communication modules (WCMs) on small flexible printed circuit boards. In order to demonstrate the behavior of our WPN on a textile, we designed a WPN tutorial shirt prototype using implemented WCMs and conductive yarn.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.363-373
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• 2016

This study aims to develop an all-fabric integrated smart jacket in order to create a temperature-regulating system based on a user experience design. For this research, previous research technologies of a textile switch interface and a temperature-regulating system were utilized and a unifying technology for the all-fabric integrated smart jacket was developed which can provide the appropriate temperature environments to the human body. A self-heating textile was applied at the areas of the back and hood in the final tested jacket, and an embroidery circuit was developed in the form of a rectangle in the back and in both ears of the hood, taking into account the pattern of the jacket part where it was be applied and the embroidery production method. The textile switch interface was designed in a three-layer structure: an embroidery circuit line in a conductive yarn, an interval material, and a conductive sensing material, and it was made to work with the input and output sensors through the multiple input method. After the all-fabric integrated smart jacket was produced according to the pattern, all of the textile band lines for transmission were gathered and connected with a miniature module for controlling temperature and then integrated into the inside of the left chest pocket of the jacket. After the users put on this jacket, they were asked to assess the wearing satisfaction. Most of them reported a very low level of irritation and discomfort and said that the jacket was as comfortable as everyday clothing.