A team of Chinese researchers has developed a new layered textile that can be lit up by the touch of a finger.
- The new fibre couples the human body as part of a circuit to gather ambient electromagnetic energy, and thus it does not need any additional batteries for power.
- This fibre is composed of three distinct layers using readily available materials. The core of the fibre functions as an antenna capable of sensing alternating electromagnetic fields, crafted from silver-plated nylon fibres.
- The intermediate layer is composed of a dielectric layer made from BaTiO3 composite resin, which is optimised to enhance the coupling capacity of electromagnetic energy. On the outside is an electric field-sensitive luminescent layer composed of zinc sulfide (ZnS) composite resin.
- The study, conducted by researchers from Donghua University's College of Materials Science, has been published in Science journal.
THE CONTEXT: Smart wearable devices have become part of daily life and play an important role in health monitoring, telemedicine, human-computer interaction and other fields.
- But turning electronic components into daily clothes like t-shirts is not that easy as they have to be powered by rigid batteries and process data with chips.
THE SCIENCE: The researchers proposed an architecture that breaks the traditional linear sequential information process and integrates energy harvesting, information sensing, and signal transmission functionalities into one thread.
- The material can be interwoven into clothes for fabric display, wireless instruction transmission and other functions without using chips or batteries.
- Clothes made of the new fibre can be interactive and luminous and can also remotely control electronic products wirelessly by generating unique signals for different postures by users.
- The team is working on refining the fibres' energy-harvesting abilities from the surrounding space and expanding their functions to include displays, shape-changing, computing, and artificial intelligence.
WHAT THEY SAID:
The low cost of raw materials and the ability to use established processing techniques make it feasible to mass-produce this smart fabric.
— Yang Weifeng (First Writer)
Doctoral student
Donghua University
We believe that soon, smart clothing will be capable of doing much more, making humans more powerful and better adapted to their environment.
— Wang Zhihong (Research Team Leader)
Professor
Huadong University
