Facile Construction of a Superhydrophobic Surface on a Textile with Excellent Electrical Conductivity and Stretchability

Superhydrophobic materials integrating electrical conductivity with stretchability are strongly desirable for emerging flexible electronic devices, such as wearable electrical heaters, strain sensors, and flexible power storage apparatus, due to their long-term safe service even under wet or corrosive environments. However, it still remains a great challenge to realize the integration of superhydrophobicity, electrical conductivity, and stretchability. Herein, we demonstrated the fabrication of highly stretchable superhydrophobic conductive textile (SCT) by in situ growth of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and designing a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) layer on a textile. The resultant SCT exhibited superhydrophobicity with a large water contact angle of 154.6° and a superior electrical conductivity of 861.3 S/m. Moreover, the SCT can maintain superhydrophobicity and high electrical conductivity even after undergoing 5000 stretching–releasing (30% strain) cycles and chemical attacks for 10 h, respectively. The SCT demonstrated excellent electrical-heating performance with a high saturation temperature (63.6 °C) at an ultralow supplied voltage (1.2 V), thus holding promise as a wearable heater for thermal management. These findings conceivably make our SCT have great potential for application in flexible electronic devices that operate under extreme mechanical deformations and wet or corrosive environments.