Gadgets, gizmos, and tools to help make you more productive in business

This is really intriguing to know that by simply wearing a t-shirt we could charge a cellphone or power up a mp3 player if we walk, run, dance, etc but this may be true. Professor Zhong Lin Wang and team of the Georgia Institute of Technology are working to create the microfiber fabric that makes its own electricity.

The new technology takes advantage of the semiconductive properties of zinc oxide nanowires embedded into the fabric, which are formed into pairs of microscopic brush-like structures. One of the fibers is coated in gold and when the two rub the mecahnical energy is converted into electricity.

However, Professor Zhong Lin Wang created the nanogenerator by first coating fibers with a polymer and then a new layer of zinc oxide. It was then left for 12 hours in a warm bath of reactive solution which led to wires multiplying and coating the fibers. They added another layer of polymer to keep the zinc oxide inside and then an ultra-thin layer of gold to some of the fibers, which will act as a conductor.

"Our estimates show we can have up to 80 milliwatts per square meter of this fabric. This is enough to power a little iPod or charge a cell phone battery," [...] "What we've done is demonstrate the principle and the fundamental mechanism", Professor Wang said.

There is a small drawback to all these. Zinc oxide gets degraded when wet, so don't expect to charge any gadgets if it rains. The team is working on it though.

Reuters (picture by Gizmodo)