Predicting conducting yarn failure in woven electronic textiles

•Conductive yarns taken from a textile fail at lower strain than when still embedded in the textile.•Mechanical test of the bare yarn gives a lower bound for the strain at electrical failure.•This holds also for the textile.•A simple model predicts this lower bound.•The model involves the dtex and number of picks/cm of the weave. Smart, electronic textiles are often exposed to tensile stress which can lead to fracture of the interwoven conducting yarns. In this study, a model is proposed to relate the extensibility of the conducting yarns to the weaving pattern of the textile – in particular to the thickness and pitch of the textile yarns. The model is validated by simultaneous mechanical and electrical tests on bare yarns extracted from several textiles. The results show that mechanical failure precedes electrical failure. Thus, a lower and conservative bound for electrical failure can be obtained from the extensibility prediction as a function of the structure of the weave.