Soft capacitor fibers for electronic textiles

A highly flexible, conductive polymer-based fiber with high electric capacitance is reported. The fiber is fabricated using fiber drawing method, where a multimaterial macroscopic preform is drawn into a submillimeter capacitor microstructured fiber. A typical measured capacitance per unit length of our fibers is 60–100 nF/m which is about 3 orders magnitude higher than that of a coaxial cable of a comparable diameter. The fiber has a transverse resistivity of 5 kΩ m. Softness, lightweight, absence of liquid electrolyte, and ease of scalability to large production volumes make the fibers interesting for various smart textile applications.