Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
this will mean they get more free power which will make them even wealthier. This needs to be banned.
Free power.
Plus a $0.01 distribution fee.
Plus a $0.02 energy tax.
Plus a $0.01 fee to support the power companies losing business.
Plus a $0.005 generation fee.
Plus...
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
Power wants to be free
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Presumably the answer is: you wash it, and it still works.
No idea if this prototype has that property, but it very well might. (I didn't RTFA.) You can wash LilyPads, can't you?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
I think you need to see some 350 lbs. crack whores buying orange drink and ding dongs with their SNAP card. They vote Democrat.
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.