According to the conductive component, there are four kinds of conductive fibers: metal fiber, carbon black fiber, conductive metal compound fiber and conductive polymer fiber.
Metal fiber has good electrical conductivity, heat resistance and chemical corrosion resistance, but for textiles, metal fiber has small cohesion, poor spinning performance, and limited color of finished products. It is mostly used in carpet and work clothes fabrics, and it is expensive to make high fineness fibers.
Carbon black fiber is a kind of conductive fiber which is made by skin core spinning after mixing carbon black and fiber-forming materials. Besides maintaining the original mechanical properties of the fiber, it also obtains certain conductive properties, but the color is single, usually black or gray black, which is limited in use. The carbon fiber treated by carbonization with viscose, acrylic and asphalt as raw fibers has good conductivity, heat resistance and chemical resistance, but it has high modulus, lack of toughness, bending resistance and heat shrinkage resistance, so its application scope is limited. Carbon black is easy to fall off and hand feel is not good when carbon black is coated on the surface of fiber with coating method based on common fiber.
The conductive metal compound fiber, which is made of sulfide, iodide or oxide of copper, silver, nickel and cadmium as conductive materials, is made of mixed spinning method, adsorption method or chemical reaction method, with good fastness. The copper and silver compounds also have some additional functions, such as antibacterial and deodorization, but the cost of silver is high, while the sulfide and iodide of copper, nickel and cadmium are more conductive fibers Carbon black fiber is poor, electromagnetic shielding performance is general, mainly used for anti-static.
Among the conductive polymer fibers, the organic conductive fibers, which are made of polyacetylene, polyaniline, polypyrrole, thiophene and other conductive polymer materials, are difficult to spin, have higher prices and are difficult to be widely used in textiles.
