Electroconductive textile structures through electroless deposition of polypyrrole and copper at polyaramide surfaces

The aim of this paper is to develop metal coated textile fibres for application in textile electrodes and as a substrate for further functionalisation of the fibres. A polyaramide woven structure was used as substrate and selected because of its excellent mechanical properties and thermal resistivity. Direct plating of copper at this substrate did not give good results, therefore first polypyrrole was deposited chemically. The deposition steps are optimized in this investigation and the obtained layers are characterized with different methods. Typical thicknesses of 0.5 to 3 μm were obtained for polypyrrole and copper layers, which were dependent of the deposition time. The coated fibre structures showed excellent electroconductive properties.