Did you hear? In the future our clothes will work for us! Yes you read correctly, they will work!
A team of scientists led from Georgia Institute of Technology has created a fabric that can gather energy from sunlight and motion, then store it in embedded fibres.
The textile, described in Science Advances, could help pave the way for energy-harvesting clothes and new wearable devices.
I understand that scientists and engineers have been working for years on creating fabrics that, if worn, could harvest energy for the wearer.
“The objective was to harvest energy from our living environment, for example, human walking or muscle movement and fabric; the goal is to drive small electronics,” says senior author Zhong Lin Wang, a nanotechnologist at Georgia Tech.
“And this research recently attracted a lot of attention because these days, flexible electronics, wearable electronics, have become very popular and fashionable today. But each of them needs a power source.”
Wow! Just imagine, you buy a pair of jeans, put it on for the first time and scan a tag embedded in it with your phone. A menu of options pops up.
You can find information about its design, how the brand selected only sustainable materials and details on the exact factory where it was made. You plug in your earphones and listen to a playlist the brand put together.
Not only that though, when you want to wash that pair of jeans, just throw it in the wash and it will automatically communicate with your washing machine to select the right laundry setting!
Wang’s team has been working on various aspects of this early-stage technology for 11 years.
On top of that, any energy would have to be stored in some way that didn’t involve carrying around a bulky battery.
The team of scientists solved these issues by creating a triple-threat (or perhaps, a triple-thread) fabric: it uses dye-sensitised solar cells shaped into long fibres to harvest light energy; it uses fibre-shaped triboelectric nanogenerators to harvest electrostatic charge made by normal movement; and it also uses fibre-shaped supercapacitors to store the energy in electrochemical form.
Under sunlight, the solar cells provide the majority of the power; but indoors or on a cloudy day, the movement-based fibres pick up the slack.
Ok all this is a little beyond me what I want to know is would it perhaps be able to babysit, or go to the office for me?!
While the technology could allow users to charge phones and wearable devices, it could also make interactive garments (a gown with LED lights, for example) more feasible for fashion designers.
The research could also prove useful for building flexible screens, designing heart and other health monitors and may even find applications in robotics! I guess that answers my question!