Design of a conductive fabric network by the sheet resistance method

Combining textiles with electronics has become a promising realm in the future development of textiles. A number of researches have been conducted to exploit the potential applications, such as sports, healthcare, etc. However, the growth of wearable electronic textiles in the market is being retarded. The reasons may refer to the poor appearance of current products in that consumers may consider the products to be ‘technical’ rather than ‘garments’, since aesthetics have been ignored as a result of focusing on the functionality of the textiles. Conductive fabrics have become one of the fundamental elements of wearable electronic textiles, which form an electrically conductive network to interconnect various electronic function units, such as textile electrodes, power sources, etc. However, it is necessary to solve the high-dimensional matrix in order to compute the resistance of the conductive network, which hinders the application of conductive fabrics in industry. Therefore, it is essential to develop a direct and fast method to aid the fashion designer without an electronic background to compute the resistance of the conductive fabric so as to meet the high demand for rapid prototype development of wearable electronic garments. This paper describes a systematic approach to calculate the resistance based on the sheet resistance and number of unit squares from a macroscopic view. The experimental results demonstrated that this method could readily calculate the resistance of conductive fabrics as long as the sheet resistance and the number of unit squares are known. In addition, the proposed method can be applied to other types of conductive fabrics.