Direct Yarn Formation from Electro-Spun CNT/PAN Composite Nano-Fiber

With a great development in technological advancements and the needs of new diverse communities and application in textile such as consumers, healthcare, military and navy communities, the textile industry is shifting its focus to fabrication of next generation textiles that not only meet the basic conventional requirements, but also serve a host of other functions. In this way, researchers have always been inspired to mimic nature in order to create clothing materials with high levels of functionality and intelligence [1, 2, and 3].In the pursuit of fabricating next generation textiles, this paper presents a novel technique to produce yarns from composite nano-fibers in order to apply for smart textiles and cloths. Due to special properties of carbon nanotubes like unique 1D structure and their excellent mechanical, thermal and electrical properties [4, 5], carbon nano-tubes composite nano-fibers will be produce by electrospinning process. Some researchers are trying to have carbon nanotubes in fibers as nonwovens, but the present work proposes a new technique to form yarns directly from electrospinning process and produces continues electro-spun carbon nano-tube yarns that contain nano-fibers.The proposed nano-tube based yarn formation method is expected to become an enabling technology for a variety of macroscopic textile related applications such as energy harvesting, vibration dampening, pressure sensors, circuit designs and other special usages