RESUMO
Effective personal thermal management is crucial for protecting human health during cold weather. Therefore, wearable heaters based on electric-heating membranes are one of the most promising devices to become essential appliances in our daily lives. The main challenge toward this goal is the development of electric-heating membranes with adequate breathable, flexible, and stretchable characteristics. In the work presented here, micro-nanofibrous fluffy electric-heating membranes were prepared by coating polyurethane/graphene nanoplatelet (PU@GNP) films onto melt-blown propylene-based elastomer (PBE) micro-nanofibrous membranes via a facile, cheap, and large-scale method consisting of a coating-compressing cyclic process. Investigation of the resulting PBE/PU@GNP membranes showed that the PU@GNP films were uniformly deposited onto the PBE micro-nanofiber surfaces, forming fluffy interconnected conducting channels. By applying a voltage of 36 V to the prepared PBE/PU@GNP membranes, the temperature increased to 69.7 °C, confirming excellent electric-heating features. Moreover, the porosity of the fabricated membrane could be tailored readily by adjusting the coating-compressing cycles. Benefiting from the conducting channels, the PBE/PU@GNP membranes exhibited efficiently regulated air permeability ranging from 212 to 60.2 mm/s, a prominent softness score of 53.8, and an excellent elastic recovery rate of 85.5%. These findings demonstrate that PBE/PU@GNP micro-nanofibrous fluffy membranes may well be suitable for application in electric-heating clothing. The cyclic coating-compressing preparation process may be attractive in industrial manufacturing.