Research

Research at the Nottingham Trent University has come up with an innovative e-textile which can harness 400 milliwatts of electrical energy from the sun. It's enough to charge a basic mobile phone or smartwatch.

Graphene, the new promising material, is being used by researchers to make sustainable, washable and comfortable wearable electronic-textiles for personalised health monitoring.

Now, textiles that offer adjustable aesthetics. Work on responsive smart fabrics could help monitor people’s health, improve thermal insulation, and provide new tools for managing room acoustics and interior design.

Vapour-printing clothing fabrics could solve one of the most difficult problems in the quest to create wearable, unobtrusive sensitive sensors: the problem of pressure.

Researchers have found a way to fully integrate technology into fabric, and seamlessly integrate its power source, showing the way forward for textile energy storage devices, creating a flexible wearable supercapacitor patch.

A researcher is developing body-tracking wearable technology, or smart clothes to track fever in infants through thermochromic yarn that changes colour based on body temperature.

New cotton lines created by a multi-parent breeding approach has resulted in opportunities for natural genes to interact and develop the unexpected trait of flame retardancy. This means that when exposed to an open flame, the fabric from the new cotton lines self-extinguish whereas regular cotton fabric burns entirely in seconds. 

A $1 million funding is supporting researchers in the University of Alberta to make the science behind self-decontaminating fabrics a good fit for the production line.

A durable copper-based coating on some fabrics can detect and capture toxic substances in the surrounding environment and thus be used to make protective equipment, environmental sensors, and smart filters.

A new research seeks to identify some key fabric properties that will bolster human comfort levels in activewear.