Facile Fabrication of Cotton-Based Thermoelectric Yarns for the Construction of Textile Generator with High Performance in Human Heat Harvesting

• Published in: Advanced fiber materials (Online) Vol. 5; no. 5; pp. 1725 - 1736
• Main Authors: Jiang, Wangkai, Li, Tingting, Hussain, Bilqees, Zhou, Suibo, Wang, Zheshan, Peng, Yu, Hu, Jianchen, Zhang, Ke-Qin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer Nature Singapore 01.10.2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Bismuth tellurides; Carbon; Carbon nanotubes; Chemistry and Materials Science; Cotton; Electric potential; Energy harvesting; Ethanol; Materials Engineering; Materials Science; Mechanical properties; Moisture absorption; Nanoscale Science and Technology; Organic chemicals; Polyetherimides; Polymer Sciences; Polystyrene resins; Polyurethane resins; Receivers & amplifiers; Renewable and Green Energy; Research Article; Temperature gradients; Textile Engineering; Textiles; Thermal energy; Thermoelectricity; Voltage; Yarn; Yarns; Heat energy harvesting; Carbon nanotubes; Wearable electronics; Thermoelectric textiles
• ISSN: 2524-7921; 2524-793X
• DOI: 10.1007/s42765-023-00305-4

Thermoelectric (TE) textiles which can harvest thermal energy from the human body, are highly desirable and vital to the charging of wearable electronics owing to their stable and long-term power output. The typical carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns or bismuth telluride (Bi 2 Te 3 ) based inorganic TE materials used hitherto limit the development of TE textiles, because of their high cost and rareness. In this work, scalable and high-TE performance carbon nanotube composite yarns (CNTYs) are developed using p- and n-type tuneable multi-wall CNTs and single-wall CNTs as TE materials and waterborne polyurethane (WPU) as the binder. The mechanical properties of the CNTYs are tuned and improved considerably by adding a small amount of WPU. Furthermore, TE yarns with p- and n-type segmented structures are prepared by treating CNTYs with poly(3, 4-ethylene dioxythiophene): polystyrene sulfonate solution and n-type dopant polyetherimide, respectively. Based on the prepared p- and n-type segmented TE yarns, a TE textile with 75 p–n pairs that achieve outstanding TE output is fabricated. The TE textile can generate a high power density of 95.74 μW m −2 with a voltage density of 3.76 V m −2 at a temperature difference of 32 K. It provides an output voltage of ~ 37 mV outdoors (~ 12 ℃) when worn on the arm and demonstrates potential application to electronic devices after amplification. The fabrication method used in this study is not only a low-cost, scalable for preparing high-performance TE yarns but also realizes the body heat harvesting and temperature sensing of yarn-based TE textiles. Graphical Abstract