Cambridge researchers, working in collaboration with colleagues at Jiangnan University in China, have shown how graphene – a two-dimensional form of carbon – and other related materials can be directly incorporated into fabrics to produce charge storage elements such as capacitors, paving the way to textile-based power supplies which are washable, flexible and comfortable to wear.
The research, published in the journal Nanoscale, demonstrates that graphene inks can be used in textiles able to store electrical charge and release it when required. The new textile electronic devices are based on low-cost, sustainable and scalable dyeing of polyester fabric. The inks are produced by standard solution processing techniques.
The static cling in fresh laundry should be even more fun now.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 16 2019, @11:53AM
Even if you succeed in making a battery that can live "in the rough" on clothing, clothing gets wet, with sweat, so the positive and negative potentials will have to be robustly insulated from each other, lest the charge drain away through the conductive fluid.
Making something insulated is easy enough - dissimilar materials: non-conductive encases conductive. Making something insulated that is flexible and durable through a machine wash and dry cycle... we tried some of that back in the 90s, 2 or 3 times through the machines was the best we could hope for.
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