Two-Dimensional Materials in Textiles

Textiles, ranging from individual fibers to assembled yarns and fabrics, have long served diverse functions in apparel and across several industrial sectors. In pursuit of enhanced functionalities, the textile community is constantly exploring possible advancements as presented by emerging materials, which leads to frequent convergence of the textile community with the materials–science community in an interdisciplinary manner. Over the past two decades, the advent of two-dimensional (2D) materials, which are characterized by quantum confinement on the thickness direction and their resulting spectacular physical and chemical properties, has provided substantial opportunities to enhance technical performances of various textile products. Demonstrated applications span across diverse domains, including electronics, biomedicine, aerospace, environment, and energy. This review comprehensively surveys the recent developments on this topic, starting with various categories of 2D materials and their pertinent properties relevant to textile integration. Later, the discussion extends to a group of materials–integration techniques for textiles, while more focus is put on the fiber-spinning and surface-deposition protocols. Subsequently we delve into a variety of emerging applications as reported in literature, and in the end, we conclude with an assessment of technological constraints and the associated commercial prospects of these 2D-material/textile systems.

Graphical abstract