Bnet.com
Sumi Das: We wear clothes to keep us warm, protect us from the sun and of course look good. But in the future our apparel could do more than that turning our clothes into electric charges for our personal electronics.
The future of clothes.
Sumi Das: At the University of California at Berkeley Professor Li-Wei Lin and his team are trying to make clothes more intelligent. Out fitted with the latest technologies his lab is working on a way to inter twain electric generators into clothing fibers. So one day we'll be able to harvest energy through our normal body movements.
Li-Wei Lin: The idea is that human is a very efficient in terms of energy generation, we eat foods and exercise so our long-term goal is that since human is so efficient and we still need to move and we want to scavenge the energy out of a human. One way is to actually putting the energy generation on through the clothes.
Sumi Das: It starts by creating nano electric fibers, so small they are invisible to the naked eye. This is the foundation for Lin's nanogenerator. Today he is testing how to generate electricity through simple hand movements.
Li-Wei Lin: He is going to move his hand so you can see the move on the hand is actually going to generate a current and so when he move in this current would generation, when you move the other way around current will coming from the other direction.
Sumi Das: Lin estimates by just walking the clothes people wear might be able to produce enough power to keep their mobile phones continually charged. On the other side of San Francisco Bay cross stand rival Stanford University is also developing new materials to power clothing. Yi Cui is an assistant professor at Stanford, he is experimenting with combining common cloth with nano infused ink.
Yi Cui: We are trying to code nano materials on to textiles such as cotton cloth.
Sumi Das: This is how it works, Cui dips the cloth into the conducting ink. He then takes the fabric and bakes it in the oven, once its dry he is able to measure the charge using a multimeter, he then assembles it into a battery and tests it out.
Yi Cui: Let's see whether this textile battery work, so this is LED, you see the red color coming out from the LED it lights of this LED, it's the batteries.
Sumi Das: Cui hopes eventually the materials technology will be embedded into clothes and act as an energy storage device for your personal electronics. The future of clothes, making wired garments the perfect fit in the digital age. For bnet I'm Sumi Das.
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