Development and characterization of flexible heating fabric based on conductive filaments

Active heating garments will be a promising product for improving life quality of rheumatisants and old people in the future. This paper presented an improved fabrication method of flexible heating fabrics (FHFs) which were developed by weaving intermittently silver filaments (SFs) or coated silver yarns (CSYs) into plain fabrics, this method can control more easily density of conductive filaments and rated power of FHFs in terms of requirements. Resistance thermostability and utmost load current of several kinds of conductive materials were utilized to determine an appropriate conductive material of FHFs. Subsequently, performances of FHF with SFs were characterized by a temperature controlling and power measuring device that was developed in our laboratory. Experimental results show SF can load over 0.3 A current, but the CSY and coated silver knitted fabric (CSKF) can load less than 0.1 A current. However, resistance variation ratios (RVRs) of SF are less than etc. 1.66%, but the RVRs of CSY and CSKF exceed 10% and 20%, when environment temperature increases from room temperature to 80 and 100 °C. Furthermore, strong positive linear correlations are between rated power and utmost ascending temperature of FHFs and between power consumption and presetting equilibrium temperatures of FHFs. In general, measurement data and analysis results can provide help for the design and prediction of physical properties of FHFs.

► We present an improved fabrication method of flexible heating fabrics.
► Thermostability and utmost load current of conductive materials were studied.
► Relation of power consumption, utmost temperature and rated power was revealed.