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Soon you’ll be able to charge your phone with what you’re wearing.
Scientists at the university of South Carolina have developed a process to enable t-shirts to store an electrical charge.
Professor Xiaodong Li and researcher Lihong Bao teamed up to create a hybrid fabric which had been converted from cellulose to activated carbon by soaking a cheap t-shirt in a solution of fluoride, then drying and baking it in an oxygen-free environment.
By using small swatches of the fabric as an electrode, the researchers showed that the flexible material could then be made to act as a capacitor.
Capacitors store an electrical charge and are components of nearly every electronic device you can think of.
The hybrid fabric remained resilient even after thousands of charge-discharge cycles; performance didn’t diminish more than five per cent.
"We wear fabric every day," said Prof Li. "One day our cotton T-shirts could have more functions; for example, a flexible energy storage device that could charge your cell phone or your iPad."
"We will soon see roll-up cell phones and laptop computers on the market, but a flexible energy storage device is needed to make this possible," he added
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