Development and Characterization of Metal Woven Electric Heating Fabrics

Abstract

The textile industry focuses on providing value-added functional textile materials to cater to the demands of the consumer world. Recently, a new field of research has emerged, which combines the benefits of the textiles with the world of electronics and technology yielding products and devices referred to as electro-active textiles or smart textiles. The various textile technologies such as weaving, knitting, sewing, and printing have been used to incorporate the electrically conducting elements with textile materials. In this work, a metal woven electric heating fabric was developed and characterized for heat generating property. The electric heating fabric was developed for weaving fine copper wire as weft and acrylic yarn as warp. The temperature–electrical resistance relationship of the developed fabric was determined. The main idea of the work is to design and develop electric heating fabric which can be used with a minimum power supply in order to obtain a wearable system.