Yarn based UV photodetectors for E-textiles

Flexible electronic devices and circuits in yarn form factor are essential for comfortable and conformal e-Textiles. Such smart textiles could offer new opportunities for applications such as environment monitoring, and healthcare etc. In this work, we present a yarn-based flexible UV photodetector (PDs). The presented PD was realised by creating a network of ZnO nanowires on the stainless-steel yarn using a facile solution phase route. The PDs exhibit a response/recovery time of 12 s/9.9 s with a high responsivity of ∼14 A/W at an applied bias of 5 V. Moreover, the PDs showed a high detectivity of ∼1013 Jones. The obtained results confirm the development of a high performance, easy to integrate yarn-based PDs for smart e-Textiles.