How to Equip Para-aramide Yarns with Electro-conductive Properties

Electro-conductive textiles are increasingly demanded in our today´s technology-driven world as they combine functionalities with high wearing comfort. Thus, they are, for instance, very suitable for being applied as electrodes integrated in clothing to measure biomedical parameters of a person. For this purpose they need to be modified to provide reliable electro-conductive properties. This can be achieved by depositing metals on the textile surface. Copper and gold are good materials to be used for this purpose because of their outstanding electro-conductive properties and possibility to deposit them in form of a thin layer on the surface of a fiber. In this work preference was given to copper. Hence, a thin layer of copper was deposited on synthetic yarns by means of an electroless deposition. This paper states the coating method for the copper deposition on para-aramide yarns. Further, it reports the first results on the characterization of the copper layer and the performance of the resulting yarns.