Manufacturing Technique and Property Evaluations of Conductive Nonwoven Fabrics

Conductive textiles can be used in diverse fields, such as antistatic materials, sensors, materials for electromagnetic shielding and biomedical. This study produces nonwoven fabrics with polylactic acid (PLA) and polyaniline (PAN) and the resulting PLA/PAN nonwoven fabrics are evaluated with electromagnetic shielding effectiveness (EMSE) and air permeability. Polylactic acid (PLA) and low melting point polylactic acid (LPLA) are made into nonwoven fabrics, which are then spray-coated with different amount of PAN solution to form PLA/PAN nonwoven fabrics. The fabrics are laminated with various numbers of layers, and then thermally pressed. The experiment results show that the PAN amount and lamination number are proportional to the EMSE of the PLA/PAN nonwoven fabrics.