Production Methods of Nanofibers for Smart Textiles

Over the last two decades, the demand for polymeric nanofibers has increased manifold for various applications in areas of smart textiles. Smart textiles are those textiles that can sense stimuli from the environment, react to them, and adapt to them by integration of functionalities in the textile structure. Nanofibers are increasingly used in smart textiles for sensing, self-cleaning, tissue engineering, communication, wearable computer, and medicine areas. There are several techniques that can be used for the fabrication of nanofibers for smart textile applications, which includes electrospinning, melt blowing, bicomponent spinning, force spinning, and flash spinning. Among these processes, electrospinning is the most popular technique used for producing nanofibers. This chapter discusses about the production methods used to fabricate nanofibers that can be utilized for smart textile applications. The differences among various processes and the recent research works on the fabrication of nanofibers for smart textile applications have also been discussed.