Fabrication Challenges in Embedding of Components and Embroidered Conductors into 3D-printed Textile Electronics Structures

Abstract

The challenging unobtrusive implementation of electronics structures into clothing, with low cost and high reliability, can be achieved via utilising and adapting a novel structural additive manufacturing method. Our goal is to utilize 3D-printed flexible and washable wireless platforms, where electronics, embroidered antennas and interconnections are embedded mid-printing, created directly on textiles. During the fabrication process, several challenges were encountered. The most important challenges related to the embroidery process were repeated thread breakages, thread cluster formation at the opposite side of the embroidered patter, and non-precise positioning of the thread at different embroidery rounds. Further, during 3D printing, positioning of the starting point of the printing, resulting as misaligned 3D-printed layers, was a major challenge. This paper describes in detail the challenges encountered during the fabrication process of clothing-integrated basic wireless components, passive UHF RFID tags. Despite the introduced challenges, the ready-made textile-integrated tags showed excellent wireless performance and read ranges of around 6 meters.