Search for: All records

Cellulose-based conductive composite fibers hold great promise in smart wearable applications, given cellulose's desirable properties for textiles. Blending conductive fillers with cellulose is the most common means of fiber production. Incorporating a high content of conductive fillers is demanded to achieve desirable conductivity. However, a high filler load deteriorates the processability and mechanical properties of the fibers. Here, developing wet-spun cellulose-based fibers with a unique side-by-side (SBS) structure via sustainable processing is reported. Sustainable sources (cotton linter and post-consumer cotton waste) and a biocompatible intrinsically conductive polymer (i.e., polyaniline, PANI) were engineered into fibers containing two co-continuous phases arranged side-by-side. One phase was neat cellulose serving as the substrate and providing good mechanical properties; another phase was a PANI-rich cellulose blend (50 wt%) affording electrical conductivity. Additionally, an eco-friendly LiOH/urea solvent system was adopted for the fiber spinning process. With the proper control of processing parameters, the SBS fibers demonstrated high conductivity and improved mechanical properties compared to single-phase cellulose and PANI blended fibers. The SBS fibers demonstrated great potential for wearable e-textile applications. 

Abstract Let u u be a nontrivial harmonic function in a domain D ⊂ R d D\subset {{\mathbb{R}}}^{d} , which vanishes on an open set of the boundary. In a recent article, we showed that if D D is a C 1 {C}^{1} -Dini domain, then, within the open set, the singular set of u u , defined as { X ∈ D ¯ : u ( X ) = 0 = ∣ ∇ u ( X ) ∣ } \left\{X\in \overline{D}:u\left(X)=0=| \nabla u\left(X)| \right\} , has finite ( d − 2 ) \left(d-2) -dimensional Hausdorff measure. In this article, we show that the assumption of C 1 {C}^{1} -Dini domains is sharp, by constructing a large class of non-Dini (but almost Dini) domains whose singular sets have infinite ℋ d − 2 {{\mathcal{ {\mathcal H} }}}^{d-2} -measures.