Wearable ‘Smart Textile’ Turns Everyday Movements into Electricity

A fabric designed to power wearable devices by harvesting energy from both sunlight and body movements can be produced on a standard industrial weaving machine, according to a new study. Scientists in China and the United States have demonstrated how a glove-size piece of the “smart textile” could continuously power an electronic watch or charge a mobile phone using ambient sunlight and gentle body movements.

The fabric is based on low-cost, lightweight polymer fibers coated with metals and semiconductors that allow the material to harvest energy. These fibers are then woven together along with wool on high-throughput commercial weaving equipment to create a textile just 0.01 inches (0.32 millimeters) thick. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

“It is highly deformable, breathable and adaptive to human surface curves and biomechanical movement,” said Xing Fan, one of the fabric’s inventors and an associate professor of chemical engineering at Chongqing University in China. “And this approach enables the power textile to be easily integrated with other functional fibers or electronic devices to form a flexible, self-powered system.”

Source: LiveScience