An efficient PEDOT-coated textile for wearable thermoelectric generators and strain sensors

Abstract

Advanced wearable organic electronics have been widely studied for flexible textile-based strain sensors. However, two main issues to be addressed in wearable electronic sensors are the poor electron transfer under tensile conditions and water durability. In this work, we proposed an efficient strategy for the fabrication of a highly conductive commercial textile coated with poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) via vapor phase polymerization (VPP) as a wearable thermoelectric (TE) strain sensor. The PEDOT-coated textile exhibited excellent mechanical elasticity and electrical properties in response to external strain. More importantly, the strain sensor showed a good strain after cyclic loading of an external stress. Moreover, the as-fabricated PEDOT-coated textiles show superior water durabilities due to the robust PEDOT coatings on the textiles through the in situ polymerization process. A large output voltage of 5.0 mV was achieved at a temperature gradient (ΔT) of 25 K, which is promising for textile generator applications. An optimized gauge factor (GF) of the strain sensor reached 54 at a strain of 1.5%, which has the capability to fully satisfy the demands of wearable electronic sensor devices.