AUTEX2019 – 19 th World Textile Conference on Textiles at the Crossroads, 11-15 June 2019, Ghent, Belgium INFLUENCE OF SILANIZATION ON COPPER COATED NONWOVEN FABRIC AND THEIR ELECTRICAL CONDUCTIVITY Aravin Prince Periyasamy*, Kai Yang, Xiaoman Xiong, Mohanapriya Venkatraman, Jiri Militky, Rajesh Mishra, Dana Kremenakova Department of Material Engineering, Technical University of Liberec, Studentska 2, 46117, Liberec, Czech Republic, e-mail: aravinprince@gmail.com ABSTRACT A stabilized electromagnetic shielded (EMI) fabric was produced with a copper coating. For this, the Milife (nonwoven) was used, since it is a promising material for surface metallization which is composed of the dense net of monofilaments bonded by solid spots. For stabilization of copper deposition on the milife fabric, we treat with three different silanes. The surface morphology of the fabrics was studied and it confirms the enhanced stabilization. In this paper we describe only the electrical properties of nonwoven fabrics, the obtained results show that the copper coated fabrics were more stable and the lowest surface resistivity in the range of 3000-3400 Ω. It confirms that it belongs to shielding material and can be classified into conductive composites, but all these results are depending on the type of silane used for Silanization. Key words: copper coated, non-woven, silanization, electrical conductivity, surface resistivity. INTRODUCTION Textiles are omnipresent, the interaction with textiles is made continuously with some form such as garments, bed linen, towels, furniture upholstery and technical textiles. In order to integrate the smart applications such as electronic and electromagnetic shielding function- alities is to expand the ways using textiles and to interact with it. Metal coated textiles are classified as smart textiles due to their functionality [1-3], lightness, flexibility and with required mechanical properties that are adequate to replace the conventional metal materials. In general, the copper is metal and poor affinity on the textile materials, which results in the poor stability of the functional properties. Therefore, it is necessary to stabilize the copper particles in the textile materials, which is the promising interest for this work to develop the stabilized copper coated fabric for various functional applications such as electrical conductivity and electromagnetic shielding. Therefore, we found the novel method to stabilize the copper particles by simple sol-gel coating. In this paper, we discuss the influence of sol- gel coating on the electrical conductivity of copper coated fabric. 2. EXPERIMENTAL SECTION 100% polyester filament cross-laminated (Milife) have ben used for this work. The basic characteristics of milife fabric provided by the producer (Dr. Vecernik s.r.o.) have been given in Table 1. Table 1. Basic geometrical characteristics of MIWC and MIC samples Type Areal mass (g.m -2 ) Thickness a) (mm) Density porosity (%) TY 0505FE (MIWC) 11.4 0.040 <0.006; 0.074> b) 79 TY 0505FE (MIC) 16.6 0.063 <0.016; 0.110> b) 81 a) (Thickness for measured under pretension 200 Pa; b) 95% mean value confidence interval).