Smart Humidly Adaptive Yarns and Textiles from Twisted and Coiled Viscose Fiber Artificial Muscles

Abstract

The self-adaptive nature of smart textiles to the ambient environment has made them an indispensable part of emerging wearable technologies. However, current advances generally suffer from complex material preparation, uncomfortable fitting feeling, possible toxicity, and high cost in fabrication, which hinder the real-world application of smart materials in textiles. Herein, humidity-response torsional and tensile yarn actuators from twisted and coiled structures are developed using commercially available, cost-effective, and biodegradable viscose fibers based on yarn-spinning and weaving technologies. The twisted yarn shows a reversible torsional stroke of 1400° cm−1 in 5 s when stimulated by water fog with a spraying speed of 0.05 g s−1; the coiled yarn exhibits a peak tensile stroke of 900% upon enhancing the relative humidity. Further, textile manufacturing allows for the scalable fabrication to create fabric artificial muscles with high-dimensional actuation deformations and human-touch comfort, which can boost the potential applications of the humidly adaptive yarns in smart textile and advanced textile materials.