The electrical conductivity of conducting fibres normally decreases when they are highly stretched but researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have now created superelastic fibres based on carbon nanotubes that do not suffer from this problem. Indeed, the conductivity of the new fibres actually increases by 121-fold when they are stretched to over 11 times their original length, and such extreme stretch results in only a 5% change in their resistance. The fibres might be used in a host of flexible electronics applications, including smart textiles, artificial muscles for robots, interconnects for elastic circuits, strain sensors and failure-free pacemaker leads to name but a few……….
http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/61974
