Influence of Dry Cleaning on the Electrical Resistance of Screen Printed Conductors on Textiles

Abstract

Electrically conducting inks were screen printed on various textile substrates. The samples were dry cleaned with the usual chemicals in order to investigate the influence of the mechanical treatment on the electrical conductivity. It was found that dry cleaning has a tremendous influence on this electrical conductivity. For several samples, it is observed that the electrical resistance increases with the square of the number of dry cleaning cycles. In order to explain this observation a theoretical model and a numerical simulation have been carried out, by assuming that dry cleaning cycles introduce a crack in the conducting layer. The theoretical analysis and the numerical analysis both confirmed the experimental observations.

Keywords

• screen-printed textile conductors
• conductive ink
• textile
• dry cleaning
• electrical resistance