Characterization of Electrical Conductivity and Electrical Heating of RGO/MWCNT Coated Nonwoven Fabrics

In this study, the light-weight and flexible reduced graphene oxide and multi-walled carbon nanotube coated nonwoven fabrics were obtained by a facile and scalable blade coating technique. The polypropylene and polyester spunbond nonwoven fabric with mass per unit area of 25 g/m2 were coated with a water based-graphene oxide coating paste. Afterwards, the reduction process with L-ascorbic acid was applied to turn graphene oxide into electrically conductive reduced graphene oxide form. In addition, graphene oxide/multi-walled carbon nanotube nanocomposite coating formulations were also applied to the nonwoven fabrics to investigate the effect of multi-walled carbon nanotubes on the heating property. The obtained reduced graphene oxide-coated nonwoven textiles with and without multi-walled carbon nanotube were characterized by means of FTIR and DSC. The electrical conductivity and heating property of coated nonwoven fabrics were examined. The heating test results revealed that the coating of polypropylene nonwoven fabric with reduced graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide/multi-walled carbon nanotube was increased the surface temperature by 20.2 K and 38.6 K at 20 V, respectively.