In the future, t-shirts will charge your smartphone

The field of wearable electronics is advancing more and more but, after solving the technical problems, scientists have to face the aesthetic ones. No one wants to wear clothes weighed down by a battery, powerbank jackets or parkas equipped with cables. The most obvious solution then becomes to integrate the electric current into the fibers of the clothes themselves - flexible and light components that can be grafted into the fibers of a t-shirt. This is the challenge that a group of researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai has decided to face, where a fiber capable of storing enough electricity has recently been developed to act as a powerbank integrated into clothes if incorporated into the fabric. The most obvious application is to be able to charge smartphones and various devices simply by keeping them in your pocket.

Unlike other wearable devices, powered by conventional lithium-ion batteries, which are neither waterproof nor flexible, researchers at Fudan University have managed to make a threadlike lithium-ion capacitor, which can become the first textile battery of its kind. After several tests the material managed to maintain 90.5% of its capacity with 500 charge-discharge cycles, managing to charge even if it was bent, if it had been washed with water or perforated. Based on this discovery, the researchers succeeded in developing an industrial process to produce thread-like batteries long enough to be used as textile fibers, opening up new possibilities for wearable devices. Peng Huisheng, professor of Polymer Science and leader of the research team, said that these types of materials could enter commercial use in two to five years and become a key element for the spread of wearable electronics in the mainstream.