Jeans that charge your phone? The future of wearable batteries
Our clothing could soon store all the power we need to recharge our phones thanks to a new type of fabric that can hold electricity just like a battery, developed by Deakin scientists.
The fabric, called MXene (pronounced ‘Maxine’), is flexible, super-strong, and super-conductive.
“Imagine having a shirt that can store energy. You could have energy with you all the time. This is going to revolutionise the clothing industry,” says Dr Shayan Seyedin, who led a team that developed the new fabric.
But the fabric is only good for short bursts of power, and is expensive and enormously time-consuming to produce. And that’s before you start worrying about wearing a shirt that’s pulsing with electricity.
His latest fabric incorporates MXene, an electrically-conductive artificial nanomaterial made of an single-atom-thick layer of carbon and titanium atoms.
“There is ceramic and there is metal – MXene is something in between,” he says. “It conducts electricity almost as well as metal.”
FiveWordsForTheFuture - Dec 3, 2017 | Electricity, Fashion, nanotechnologies, Wearables
Tagged | batteries, clothing, fabric, textiles, wearables
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