Abstract
Conductive polymer-coated textiles are part of a family of recently developed composite materials with potential applications in many fields. In this paper. we report the electrical properties of conductive polypyrrole-coated polyester fabrics under various experimental conditions. The properties studied include the volume and surface resistivities. as well as the broadband dielectric relative permittivity and loss index. We found that both the surface and volume resistivities of the coated textiles dropped by more than 10 orders of magnitude compared with the uncoated fabric. while the dielectric properties exhibited a strong relaxation from 5 Hz to 13 MHz. The volume resistivity of the coated materials varied between 101 and 102 Ω.m, while the surface resistivity changed from 102 to 104 Ω/square depending on the coating thickness. It was also found that their electrical properties were not affected significantly by environmental factors. such as humidity and sterilization by gamma/radiation. The conduction and relaxation mechanisms associated with these changes are discussed.