A facile one-pot scalable production of super electromagnetic shielding conductive cotton fabric by hierarchical graphene-composites

This paper uses the scaleable and commercial in-situ (exhaust) dyeing method to fabricate reduced graphene oxide (rGO)/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT: PSS) hybrids on knitted cotton fabrics to develop lightweight, flexible, and metal-free knitted cotton fabric for electromagnetic interference shielding (EMI SE) application. The graphene oxide (GO) and PEDOT: PSS solution were directly dyed and reduced through a green reducing agent C 6 H 8 O 6 (L-ascorbic acid) at a low temperature (60 °C) by a commercially used exhaust dyeing process on cotton fabric. The morphology and elemental analysis, mechanical stability, hydrophobicity, electrical conductivity, and (EMI SE) performance rGO/PEDOT: PSS dyed fabric has been systematically studied. The electrical conductivity of the resultant composite fabric significantly improved up to 4.2 × 10 3  Scm −1 due to the higher inter bonding and adhesion of fibers in the yarn, and fabric assembly, with each fiber surface finely coated with composite of rGO and PEDOT: PSS with each other due to less interlayer spacing. The mechanical stability of tensile strength and hydrophobic performance of rGO/PEDOT:PSS composite dyed hybrid (RPD-1) significantly improved up to 49 MPa and 156°, respectively, due to an increase of graphene wt.%. The resultant cotton fabric exhibited outstanding EMI shielding performance up to − 49 dB on 30–1530 MHz and 39 dB on 8–18 GHz (X-band) frequency range which shielded almost 99.99% of incident electromagnetic radiation waves. Graphical abstract