| Author: | Han, Jing |
| Title: | Hierarchically buckled surface engineering of textile substrates with stretchable porous microarchitectures |
| Advisors: | Xu, Bingang (SFT) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Department: | School of Fashion and Textiles |
| Pages: | xxiv, 216 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Textile wearables have been widely used in our daily lives and regarded as the second human skin. They have attracted significant attention in wearable technologies owing to their unique natures and remarkable properties such as excellent flexibility, good air permeability, lightweight, thermal-protective, versatile structure designs, and robust mechanical deformation capacities. In practical applications, fibers usually require further modifications with functional materials for the enhancement of their physicochemical properties or the incorporation of specific advanced functions by physical or chemical methods. However, there is still a considerably difficult challenge in endowing the textiles with desired functionalities or microstructures while keeping their unique fiber texture features and inherent properties. In this research, inspired by the surface buckling of finger joint skin, a new kind of hierarchically buckled porous microstructured textiles (HBPMTs) has been delicately designed and fabricated using stretchable elastic textiles and polymer brick materials, by a unique strategy involving a modified breath figure (BF) method. BF is a unique self-assembly strategy in which water droplet arrays are used as templates for the assembly of polymer brick materials to generate hierarchically porous microstructures on different substrates with tunable sizes in the range from hundreds of nanometers to dozens of micrometers. The first study introduces a novel fabrication strategy for hierarchically buckled porous microstructured fibers (HBPMFs), inspired by the surface buckling of finger joint skin. By using a combination of material system manipulation, interfacial self-assembly, stretching-releasing control, and thermal annealing, the research demonstrates the development of fibers with skin-like buckling and stretchable porous microarchitectures. These HBPMFs exhibit enhanced stretchability, increased specific surface area, and the ability to incorporate functional nanomaterials effectively. Application demonstrations, such as photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants using TiO₂-integrated HBPMFs, highlight significantly improved performance compared to conventional fiber materials. This work provides an efficient approach for designing advanced functional fibers with customizable features for wearable and environmental applications. The second study proposes an innovative development of hierarchically buckled porous microstructured fabrics (HBPMFs) tailored for energy harvesting and self-powered sensing applications. Utilizing a surface self-assembly approach, HBPMFs were fabricated from commercially available elastic fabrics, incorporating a combination of unique microarchitectural designs and functional nanoparticles such as TiO₂, BaTiO₃, and Ag. The research demonstrates the significant enhancement of triboelectric nanogenerators in terms of structural stability, stretchability, and electrical outputs, with Ag NPs-doped HBPMFs-TENGs exhibiting voltage, current, and charge enhancements of 4, 3, and 6 times respectively over the HBPMFs-TENGs. Moreover, Ag NPs-doped HBPMFs-TENGs effectively powered wearable electronics and acted as self-powered sensors capable of detecting fine motions, such as breathing and joint movements, illustrating their potential for integration into smart wearables and healthcare monitoring systems. The third study explores an advanced modification of carbon fibers through a core-spun yarn structure, where elastic fibers serve as the core wrapped by carbon fibers, creating a composite material with enhanced flexibility and mechanical properties. Utilizing the high-humidity breath figure (BF) fabrication method, the core-spun yarn carbon fibers are processed into hierarchically buckled porous structures (HBPFSs) and coated with nickel-cobalt layered double hydroxide (NiCo-LDH) nanostructures via hydrothermal treatment. This approach yields stretchable supercapacitors with excellent mechanical resilience and electrochemical performance. Even under significant tensile strain, the devices maintain robust energy storage capabilities, showcasing the potential of integrating core-spun yarn processing with hierarchical structural design for next-generation flexible and stretchable energy storage systems, particularly in wearable electronics and smart textiles. The fourth study presents a new approach to develop highly flexible and efficient energy storage systems for wearable electronics. By employing a novel fabrication method, carbon nanotube (CNT) and styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS) composites are processed into hierarchically buckled porous structureson knitted carbon fabrics under high-humidity conditions. This structure enables uniform hydrothermal growth of nickel-cobalt layered double hydroxide (NiCo-LDH) nanostructures, achieving an optimized balance between mechanical flexibility and electrochemical performance. The device of stretchable supercapacitors retains 94% of their capacitance under 80% tensile strain and demonstrates excellent durability with only 8% degradation over 20,000 charge-discharge cycles, with a maximum specific capacitance of 4948 mF cm⁻² at 2 mA cm⁻² and an energy density of 801.6 µWh cm⁻². Its application potential is further demonstrated by powering wearable electronics under dynamic deformation conditions, making it a strong candidate for next-generation smart textiles and wearable technologies. This comprehensive research highlights the remarkable versatility of hierarchically buckled porous microstructured textiles and their associated functionalized systems. The innovative methodologies and advanced designs outlined across these studies demonstrate significant improvements in mechanical resilience, energy harvesting, sensing, and energy storage capabilities. Thus, the findings provide promising pathways for the development of next-generation textile-based wearables, offering transformative potential for applications in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and smart electronic systems. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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