Digital Textile Design

E textiles, also known as Digital Textile Design or smart textiles, are fabrics that enable digital components, and electronic textile to be embedded in them. Many intelligent clothing, smart clothing, wearable computing projects involve the use of electronic textiles. Today, metal fibers are finding new applications in the development of digital textile design. Electrically conductive fibers can be classified into two general categories, those that are obviously conductive and those that are individually treated to create conductivity.

History of Textile in Fabricland:

The basic things needed to build E textiles, conductive threads and fabrics have been around for over 1500 years. In particular, artisans have been wrapping fine metal foils, most often gold and silver, around fabric threads for centuries .For example, are embroidered with gold wrapped threads of fabricland.

At the end of the 18th century, as people developed and grew accustomed to electronic designers and engineers began to combine electricity with clothing and jewelry developing a series of illuminated and motorized necklaces, hats, broaches and costumes in fabricland.

Manufacturing Process of Performance Textiles: 

Metallic fibers are finding new applications in the development of electronic textiles in worldwide

Performance Textiles
Performance of Digital Textile

Benefits of Electronic Textile: 

  • Flexibility
  • No wires to snag environment
  • Large surface Area
  • Invisible
  • Cheap engineering

Construction of Electronic Textiles:

  • Lily Pad Arduino
  • Fabric kit.
  • Aniomagic
  • Flora

Conductive fabrics and textiles are plated or woven with metallic elements such as silver, nickel, tin, copper, and aluminum these are: electro-nylon, electro-nylon nickel, clear-mesh, soft-mesh, electro-lycra and steel-cloth. They are lightweight, flexible, durable, soft and washable (some) and can be sewn like traditional textiles, which makes them a great replacement for wires in computational garments.Conductive threads and yarns have a similar purpose to wires and that is to create conductive paths from one point to another.

Development of Performance Textiles:

Some of the most advanced functions that have been demonstrated in the lab include performance textiles-

fabricland
Digital Textile on Fabricland

Materials of Digital Textile :

  1. Shape memory alloys
  2. Piezoelectric
  3. Chromic
  4. Photo chromic
  5. Chromic inks
  6. Nano materials
  7. Microfibers
[1]Md. Ashraful Alam Masum, B.Sc.in Textile Engineering, BUBT