Abstract:

The metallised textile material available on the market is not suitable for several applications because of its uneven metal layer with imperfections on the fibre surface, which leads to a lack of adhesion and failures of the metal layer, impairing further processing as well as the functioning of the metallised textiles. Furthermore the wet-chemical metallisation of textile substrates has so far been limited to only a few polymers (polyamide). In the framework of this work, the scientific basis for the antimicrobial and electrical functionalisation as well as modification of inert textile material made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) was acquired. Since textiles produced from PET have an inert and hydrophobic surface, which means they do not have functional groups, a wet-chemical one-bath and two-bath metallisation method was developed to permanently attach silver and silver compounds to the chemically inert fibre surface.