Citation: Alhashmi Alamer, F.; Aqiely, W. Eco-Friendly, Low-Cost, and Flexible Cotton Fabric for Capacitive Touchscreen Devices Based on Graphite. Crystals 2023, 13, 403. https://doi.org/10.3390/ cryst13030403 Academic Editor: Dmitri Donetski Received: 25 January 2023 Revised: 15 February 2023 Accepted: 24 February 2023 Published: 26 February 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). crystals Article Eco-Friendly, Low-Cost, and Flexible Cotton Fabric for Capacitive Touchscreen Devices Based on Graphite Fahad Alhashmi Alamer * and Wedad Aqiely Department of Physics, Faculty of Applied Science, Umm AL-Qura University, Al Taif Road, Makkah 24382, Saudi Arabia * Correspondence: fahashmi@uqu.edu.sa Abstract: Cotton fabrics with high electrical conductivity were prepared using graphite dispersed in ethanol as the conductive material. The graphite particles were drop-cast onto the cotton fabrics at room temperature. The samples were characterized by SEM, EDX, XPS, and XRD. In addition, the electrical properties of the cotton samples were investigated using a four-probe technique. The concentration of the dispersed graphite was increased to a saturation concentration of 74.48 wt% to investigate the relation between the sheet resistance of the conductive cotton and the graphite concentration. With increasing graphite concentration, the sheet resistance decreased and reached the minimum value of 7.97 Ω/ at a saturation concentration of 74.48 wt%. Samples with low, medium, and high graphite concentration showed semiconducting metallic behavior at a transition temperature of 90 ◦ C. Based on their individual electrical properties, a smart glove was fabricated for touchscreen devices such as cell phones and self-service devices by dropping a small amount of dispersed graphite into one of the fingertips of the glove. The smart glove showed high efficiency and durability up to 10 wash cycles. Keywords: cotton fabrics; dispersed graphite; semiconducting metallic; smart gloves; touchscreen 1. Introduction The topic of electronic textiles has recently become a multidisciplinary research area due to recent advances in scientific research and technological innovation [1–3]. An ideal candidate for the fabrication of smart textiles is cotton fabrics endowed with electrical conductivity [4–10]. The most important features of these smart textiles are their ability to sense, recognize, and respond to the wearer’s movements and behaviors [11–14]. The ability to compute, activate, and transform data are other features of smart textiles [15–18]. Potential applications of smart textiles include wearable sensors [19–21], wireless communi- cation [22], and photovoltaic devices [23]. Various materials such as metals [24], conductive polymers [8–10,25,26], and carbon-based materials [5–7] can be used to fabricate conductive textiles, which is usually performed by simple methods such as casting, spraying, coating, and dipping. Recently, carbon-based materials such as graphite [27], graphene [28,29], graphene oxide [30,31], reduced graphene oxide [32], and carbon nanotubes [33–35] have attracted great interest in the field of electronic textiles due to their excellent electrical properties and mechanical stability. In the study presented by Alamer et al., highly electrically conductive fabrics were fabricated using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) [36]. The filtration method was used to fabricate the conductive cotton fabric. The results showed that the conductivity of the treated cotton fabrics depended on the concentration of SWCNTs, and a low sheet resistance of 0.006 Ω/ was achieved at a concentration of 41.5 wt%. The electrical conductivity of the treated cotton fabrics was affected by temperature, with the conductivity decreasing with increasing temperature, and a transition occurred at about 75 ◦ C, resulting in an increase in conductivity with increasing temperature. Crystals 2023, 13, 403. https://doi.org/10.3390/cryst13030403 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/crystals