Electrically Conductive Flame Sprayed Aluminium Coatings on Textile Substrates

Electrically conductive and flexible Aluminium coatings using powder and wire flame spraying were successfully deposited onto diverse textiles. The influence of different process parameters as well as the fabric materials on the electrical conductivity and microstructure of the metal-fabric composites were studied. Preliminary results show that in order to obtain excellent coating surface conductivity values, a specific coating quantity higher than 20 mg/cm² is necessary. After further optimization of the spraying parameters, a very good specific surface conductivity (~500 S_i) could be obtained even with reduced coating quantities. This corroborates that by performing an adequate parameter optimization a reduction of the specific coating quantity could be done while still keeping high conductivity values. Furthermore, when the coating quantity is reduced, the flexibility of the fabric substrates is better conserved. This study illustrates that optimized electrically conductive composites with flexible fabric substrates can be produced, without any preliminary thermal or chemical fabric specifications.