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Energy-Generating Fabric Set To Power Battery-Free Wearables
An anonymous reader writes A team of researchers in Korea and Australia have developed a flexible fabric which generates power from human movement – a breakthrough which could replace batteries in future wearable devices. The effect of the fabric's nanogenerators mirrors static electricity with the two fabrics repeatedly brushing against each other and stealing electrons from the one another – this exchange creates energy from the wearer's activity without the need for an external power source. During testing, the researchers demonstrated the nanogenerator powering a number of devices such as LEDs, a liquid crystal display, as well as a keyless car entry system embedded in a nanogenerator 'power suit'.
1. You have to wear that specific garment; 2. You have to get the power from the garment to the device. It isn't going to happen. Just give us a better battery.
Soon enough once they finish the SkyNet AI it will take over the world and enslave us all into containers where our body heat will be used as 'human batteries' to power the Matrix...
1. Make power underwear
2. Connect it to a compact Orgamorator.
3. Switch it on!
4. Profit!
1. Get swim suit made of magic fabric.
2. Swim, thereby heating the pool.
3. Say goodbye to expensive pool-heating bills!
build a track suit, generate power from running, use this for cooling, stick a little hamster logo on it...
How much power can be generated from me moving my hand to and from the Cheetos packet?
They've been made for years by Citizen, Seiko, etc for years
this will mean they get more free power which will make them even wealthier. This needs to be banned.
I've been generating electricity for years, baby!
While I agree that putting the fabric inside a coat demonstrates a naive view of human factors (you can't wash the coat, you have to wear it all the time, etc.), I wonder if this might simply be the first idea they had after developing the invention?
Fabric generating power from movement would seem to have applications in other places: sails on boats; flags flying on buildings; tarpaulins on trucks, maybe quite a few others if the fabric is sufficiently robust enough.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I call prior art
Considering that I wash my clothes from time to time, how would this go through my mums washing machine? How would it react to me pouring fizzy drink on myself from time to time? I don't get out much, but it would be cool if this had some kind of solar aspect to it. I've always wanted to be more like a plant.
There's only one part that should smell like fish and it's not your anus and it doesn't apply to dudes.
I am sick of those attention whores in Australian universities - those chinese and indians who do whatever they can to attract attention and push their funding agenda. I'm tired of articles like this, that claim a "breakthrough" when there is nothing even remotely near a good, reproducible and insightful science. It must be stopped, but unfortunately this means that a substantial bulk of those pseudoscience schmucks will be thrown away, and I know that it is not going to happen.
The other week we had a chinese paper shill Xinhua Wu from Monash Uni whose intellectual capacity was enough for taking apart a decades-old jet engine and using 20-years-old 3D-printing technology to replicate a non-working (!) mockup. This time we have korean morons (you know, Jianjian Lin and Jung Ho Kim are typical Australian names) who claim a "revolution" again, and I'm quoting:
A high output voltage and current of about 120 V and 65 microA, respectively, were observed from a nanopatterned PDMS-based WTNG, while an output voltage and current of 30 V and 20 microA were obtained by the non-nanopatterned flat PDMS-based WTNG under the same compressive force
Slashdot crowd, can you hear me? MICROAMPERS! How many decades you need to wear this crap to charge even a small battery? How many shitty articles like this do we need to understand that those korean morons will never come up with anything but insignificant incremental improvements?! How many times do we have to get depressed to realize that University of Wollongong, Australia, is nowhere near top-20 ozzie universities and has never done anything remotely important?
Corduroy Pants and thigh-mounted thermocouples. Could maybe power a Peltier Chiller all up in there...
You want to produce power with clothing? Just bring back cheap polyester clothing. The static discharge alone would power an iWatch.
Yes, lets call it an iWatch just to piss off apple marketing and branding idiots.
Now not only can you can go around shocking people by dragging your feet on the carpet but you can REALLY zap them with a wave of your arms.
I can't wait to see how many cell phones, computers, monitors, etc. are damaged by this.
I can power all the devices the summary lists with two coins stuck lemon juice or a potato, A mere 1.1 mW? A single "D" alkaline battery would last for a year and a couple months at that power level.
How about flags? It's windy as heck here, and putting up a flag is about as easy as anything ever gets. You get a lot of motion, at least in this neck of the woods.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.