A smart fabric that could charge smartphones and other wearables is in the works. (Photo : Getty Images)
Imagine indirectly translating your energy into juice for your smartphone during your morning jog.
This idea just came to fruition when a collaborative effort by U.S. and Chinese researchers led to the fabrication of a "smart" fabric that can generate power through solar and piezoelectric energy coming from sunlight and human motion. This relatively new technology could replace existing energy sources for wearable electronics and even smartphones.
According to one of the nanotechnologists at Georgia Tech, Zhong Lin Wang, who also led the team of scientists behind the innovation, the idea of the textile technology gained traction along with the recent trend on wearable electronics.
However, the project is not without its hurdles. Fabricating a material that could efficiently harvest energy from sunlight and human movements is hard enough, let alone seamlessly sew it into a piece of garment.
Storing enough of this energy to power up a small device without much compromising the natural feel of fabric such as softness and flexibility also comes on top of it all.
The team came up with a simple, yet elegant solution: fiber-like dye-sensitized solar cells. The material was designed such that its fibrous nature doubles as triboelectric nanogenerators capable of translating movement, even simple, regular ones, into usable energy. Supercapacitors in the form of fibers were used to store generated energy in electrochemical form.
The professor, however, was quick to add that there's still so much room for improvement leading to the technology's commercialization, citing flexibility, durability and performance could be taken to a whole new level.
As exciting as all these already sound, the research opens up an even wider range of potential applications. A fully realized smart fabric could someday regulate temperature to keep you cool or warm depending on your environment. It could also act as an overall health monitor sometime in the future, or a smart attire much like Tony Stark's Iron Man suit, but without the iron part, just your ordinary, day-to-day outfit.
