Now, T-shirts to charge mobile phones and other devices

A new way to charge your phones and other devices through your T-shirts has been found out by the Scientists at the University of South Carolina.

According to the scientists, a cheap T-shirt can be used to store electrical power, which could use the surface of the clothes efficient to charge phones and other devices.

With this new invention the prediction is high that this new technology will soon be available in the market to roll up the smartphones and laptops market.

Professor Xiaodong Li, the man behind the project said that development of these technologies would stimulate the need for "flexible energy storage."

Li is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Carolina collaborated with post-doctorate researcher Lihong Bao to find a solution.

To conduct the research, they used a T-shirt bought from a local discount store, which was further soaked in a fluoride solution, dried and then baked in an oxygen-free environment at significantly high temperature.

During this process, the fibres of the fabric got converted from cellulose to activated carbon, but the material remained flexible.

Further, the researchers demonstrated that the material could be made to act as a capacitor by using small parts of the fabric as an electrode.

Capacitors are used as a component in almost all kinds of electronic device on the market to store electrical charge.

Moreover, the electrode performance of the fabric can further be enhanced by coating the individual fibres of the carbonised fabric with manganese oxide just a nanometre thick.

"This created a stable, high-performing supercapacitor," the BBC quoted Prof Li as saying.

The hybrid supercapacitors proved quite flexible as even passing through thousands of charge-discharge cycles the performance of the capacitors did not diminish more than 5 percent, the researchers said.

"By stacking these supercapacitors up, we should be able to charge portable electronic devices such as cell phones.
"We wear fabric every day. 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," Prof Li added.

The findings of the research were published in the Advanced Materials journal.

-With inputs from ANI