Textile humidity sensors

Monitoring of humidity is a widespread application for process control, lifetime assessment of components and assemblies, environmental control systems, medical textiles, working clothes and personal safety systems. To allow spatially resolved mapping of this parameter over a larger textile surface, discrete sensor elements are presently placed separately onto the textile material. Hence, the actual integration level of sensors in textile materials and therefore the value creation is rather low. To achieve a higher integration level textile sensors are needed. To serve this need the development and characterization of different textile-based humidity sensors using spinning, printing and coating technologies is described in this paper. It was shown that the developed sensors were sensitive towards relative humidity in the range of 25 to 80 % rel. humidity.