Dead phone or MP3 player batteries may soon be a thing of the past as there is now a personal generator suit to ensure your gadgets are always charged.
Nature.com reports that “Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have made a yarn out of nanofibres that produce charge when they are rubbed against one another. Materials woven from these yarns could be used for self-powering clothes, shoes or biological implants such as pacemakers.”
The technology is based on the use of piezoelectric fibers, which produce a voltage when they are stretched, bent, or compressed. It’s not quite ready for “prime-time” yet however. So far the largest of the prototype yarns consisted of only a few fibers.
"It's certainly forward-looking," says Joe Paradiso, director of the Responsive Environments Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media lab. He notes that it's not clear at this stage what kind of movement could generate the power needed for real applications, or whether these fibres could really work efficiently and reliably in something such as clothing or fabric.
Wang believes they will, and expects a material to be produced within three years that is fully functional, flexible and wearable — although whether it will be fashionable remains to be seen.
(nature)
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