News & Analysis
Comment
Joe Cu Ph
Before I worked in the electronics industry I was a fabric designer at a warp ...
Dave.Dykstra
Very cool! With this, you could use the garment to power a pacemaker, or even ...
Power supply design impregnated into textiles
Rebecca Brodie
10/29/2011 9:03 PM EDT
Scientists in the US have taken the first steps towards designing a flexible and lightweight fabric that can act as a power supply for smart garments. Electronic textiles, or 'smart' textiles, are fabrics that have built-in functions such as sensing, data storage and communication. But as with all electronics, they require a power source. Conventional batteries are too bulky to wear, so a power source that can be combined and integrated into the garment is highly desirable.
Previous attempts to make wearable energy storage devices involved the use of nonwoven materials not usually used in clothes and expensive active materials like carbon nanotubes and nanowires. Yury Gogotsi and colleagues at Drexel University, Philadelphia, have taken every day fabrics like woven cotton and polyester materials and impregnated them with porous carbon powders, taking advantage of the natural porous nature of these materials. Using common techniques like screen printing, ink-jet printing and dip-coating, textile electrodes can be made on a large scale without the expense of new processes.
"Our work makes a significant advancement in this area as our electrodes can store 400-700 times the energy per area of previously reported literature while also being flexible, non-toxic and has great potential to be integrated into textiles and clothing," says Gogotsi. The woven and knitted fabrics have empty space between individual fibres and between yarns, and it is into these spaces that the carbon powders are inserted, allowing ion transfer. The team were able to achieve higher mass loadings and capacitance levels on comparison with previous techniques.
"The relatively simple approach to engender conductivity to textile substrates has broad impact," comments Tushar Ghosh, a specialist in textile engineering from North Carolina State University, US. "The work contributes to the body of knowledge necessary for energy harvesting and storage in textiles of the future." Although more work is needed to get a finished product, the hope is to develop this technology into a number of smart garment devices that can be used in a variety of fields such as healthcare, the army and even aerospace exploration.
This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.
|
|
|
|
|
Sanjib.Acharya
10/30/2011 11:56 AM EDT
Wow! Things those were thought to be part of only the science fiction might going to happen in real world. During one of our training classes on creative thinking, the topic was about how one could escape the laundry. Some body came out with an idea of inventing an electronic dress, which could change colour and look...so that you have only a couple of dresses, and that's it. Looks possible?
Sign in to Reply
DrQuine
10/31/2011 4:14 PM EDT
Last week we heard that silicon circuits can be made flexible if the material is thin enough and rippled on a prestretched elastic substrate. With this development for woven materials, soon we won't even know when we're looking at electronic circuits. Illuminated clothing to guide us in the dark? Bring on the innovation.
Sign in to Reply
Dave.Dykstra
10/31/2011 11:16 PM EDT
Very cool! With this, you could use the garment to power a pacemaker, or even to recharge the battery for one! And the possibilities go on and on.....
Sign in to Reply
Joe Cu Ph
11/1/2011 6:26 AM EDT
Before I worked in the electronics industry I was a fabric designer at a warp knitting factory. There I saw that Nylon or Polyester fabrics of 40 Denier or bigger have spaces between the fibers that are more than 50% of the fabric surface, so the spaces available for carbon is as much as the size of the fabric itself. Very promising development!
Sign in to Reply