Electronic textiles’ primordial component are the connections that allow a circuit to be formed. As for today, the catalogue of conductive yarns is expanded to highly conductive metals such as copper, silver and steel, or electroconductive plastics composed of conductive polymers and electroconductive fillers such as metal particles or carbon allotropes.

Ionic liquids are also able to carry electrical charges, and their capacity to conduct electricity has yet to be investigated as a yarn component, e.g. an ion conducting coating.

Here, we report on attempts to coat ionic liquid-based click-ionogel on fibres, using thiol-ene reactions with the help of a photobase generator.

Ionogel precursors, composed of plurithiol precursors, acrylate monomers and a triflate ionic-liquid, are applied on yarn and then cured by UV irradiation, initiating the Michael reaction and creating the thiol-acrylate-triflate network around the yarn.

The aim of the present study is to prepare and characterise yarns coated with such ionogels, while developing a continuous yarn coating process.

Several different ionogel compositions and different yarn topologies are investigated, comparing their structure, electrical conductivity, mechanical properties, thermal stability, behaviour to chemical reagents, as well as the different surface tensions and interfacial interactions.

Textile processability is explored by the manufacture of simple fabrics.

An application for those ionic conductive coating is the ion supply for electroactive polymers coated yarns that currently rely on electrolytes. This novel coating will render the light-weight property of textile valuable, and therefore broadening their application as wearables.