A T Shirt Could Charge your Gadget

The engineers from the University of South Carolina have come with a product that is inexpensive and eco friendly; and ready to charge your gadgets ranging from something as simple to your cell phone to tablets and other devices.  For this, the researchers have fixed their gaze on a simple cotton T shirt.

They plan to turn this material into a source of electrical power. The research conducted by the two engineers showed that a modified store bought T shirt could be turned into fabric that stands well as a super capacitor, storing an electrical charge.  The engineers see such a future where electronics are a part of our wardrobe.

Xiaodong Li, one of the engineers who worked on the shirt said, "By stacking these super capacitors up, we should be able to charge portable electronic devices such as cellphones. We wear fabric every day. One day, our cotton T-shirts could have more functions. "

Li and a fellow researcher in his lab, Lihong Bao, soaked a cotton T shirt in fluoride, dried it and then baked it an oven without any oxygen in order to prevent the T shirt from burning. The fabric retained its flexibility even after baking. The baked T shirt was again observed by the researchers, where they discovered that cotton fibres had turned into activated carbon, similar to the carbon in water and air filters. They also found the activated carbon fabric could store electrical charge as a capacitor, an electrical component that's found in most devices.

Next move for the researchers was to improve the T shirts's electricity-storing ability.  For this, they coated the T-shirt fibers with a layer of manganese oxide one nanometer thick, or about 1/1000th the thickness of a human hair. This procedure showed that manganese oxide-covered fibers worked as a more efficient capacitor than the treated, toasted cotton alone. 

This hybrid fabric, in which the activated carbon textile fibres are coated with nanostructure manganese oxide, improved the energy storage capability beyond the activated carbon textile alone. Li said that this created a stable, high performing supercapacitor. The hybrid super capacitors were resilient even after thousands of charge-discharge cycles, performance didn't diminish more than 5 per cent.

Li concluded, "By stacking these super capacitors up, we should be able to charge portable electronic devices such as cellphones."

This finding was published in the journal Advanced Materials.