Application of Electrically Conductive Textiles as Electromagnetic Shields in Physiotherapy

Abstract The technology of electrically conductive fibre production has been devised at the Textile Research Institute (Łodź, Poland), and has patent protection in Europe and the USA. Elec-trically conductive nonwovens (stitch-bonded and needled) made from these fibres differ from each other not only in production technology, but also in electric properties. Measu-ring the shielding effectiveness of these fabrics proved a possibility of their application as electromagnetic shields. Their practical application was presented for physiotherapy where short-wave and microwave diathermy is used. Key words: electro-conductive textiles, electromagnetic shields, physiotherapy. and considerably lower cost, in compari-son with shields made of metal sheets and wire mesh.Materials of high electrical conductance can act as electromagnetic field shields only in the range of higher frequencies (>300 MHz). In practice, in this case they equally attenuate the electric component E as well as the magnetic component H. For fields of frequency <30 MHz, at-tenuation of the magnetic component H is very difficult, and is possible only thanks to the use of ferromagnetic materials. For some applications, only the attenuation of the electric component E is satisfactory. Fabrics made of Nitril-Static (PAN fibres modified by Cu