Circuits added to fabrics with perovskites and inkjet printing

The breakthrough by Oregon State University researchers will allow circuits to be applied with precision, and at low processing temperatures, directly onto cloth. The team, including Rutgers University researchers, believe their solution provides a potential solution to the longstanding trade-off between performance and fabrication costs.

Textile embedded strain sensor makes it through the wash

"Much effort has gone into integrating sensors, displays, power sources and logic circuits into various fabrics for the creation of wearable, electronic textiles," said Chih-Hung Chang, professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State. "One hurdle is that fabricating rigid devices on cloth, which has a surface that's both porous and non-uniform, is tedious and expensive, requiring a lot of heat and energy, and is hard to scale up. And first putting the devices onto something solid, and then putting that solid substrate onto fabric, is problematic too - it limits the flexibility and wearability of the fabric and also can necessitate cumbersome changes to the fabric manufacturing process itself."