Charge your cell phone by plugging in your jeans: Fabric Batteries

Fabric Batteries for Clothes that Can Conduct Electricity

Breakthrough:
A carbon-nanotube dye that can turn fabrics into batteries to make clothes that conduct electricity. All you have to do is dip a piece of fabric in a solution infused with tiny tubes of carbon, and it turns into a battery. Simply coating a piece of cotton or polyester with the formulation transforms it into a high performance energy storage device that is a boost to the emerging field of wearable electronics.

The approach was first demonstrated by Stanford University in 2009 on plain copying paper, but now it has been applied to textiles for the first time. “Wearable electronics represent a developing new class of materials... which allow for many applications and designs previously impossible with traditional electronics technologies," the authors wrote in the journal Nano Letters. The research could pave the way to unobtrusive wearable electronics for use in health monitoring systems, the fashion and gaming industries, and for any application that requires computers.

A team led by Prof Yi Ciu incorporated single-walled carbon nanotubes - cylinders of carbon about a billionth of a meter across – into the textiles by a simple dying process. The dye is made by dispersing carbon nanotubes in water and using sodium dodecylbenzenesulphonate as a surfactant. The material is dipped into the mixture and then dried in an oven at 120 degrees Celsius for ten minutes to remove water.

The conductivity of the material is increased by simple mechanical pressing and boosted still further by increases in the number of dipping and drying steps. The fabric maintains its properties when stretched and pulled and there is no decrease in conductivity - even when it is rinsed in water. Cotton proved to be up to 3 times better for energy storage than man-made fibers as its porous nature allowed for better ion transport.

Experts believe the technology could be commercialized in a short space of time, and that its uses will not be limited to just energy storage devices. According to Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley it has the potential to be a low-cost flexible electrode for any electrical device.The Stanford researchers say the next stages of their research are to use the approach with materials that can store more energy, and then demonstrate how to integrate the textile energy storage devices into clothes.

Read more at: http://www.tcetoday.com/tcetoday/newsdetail.aspx?nid=12465

A charger that absorbs Wi-Fi signals for energy

RCA Airnergy Charger Lets You Charge Devices With Wi-Fi

At CES 2010 in Las Vegas last week, RCA revealed what could be the world’s very first practical wireless charger — the RCA Airnergy charger.

The Airnergy charger connects to devices via a mini-USB port, and gets its energy from Wi-Fi signals, of all things. That means you can charge your devices whenever you’re in a hotspot, without ever having to plug into AC power. The Airnergy was tested on the CES floor, and it was able to charge a Blackberry from 30% to full-charge in an hour and a half.

RCA says the wireless charger will hit store shelves this summer at $40 a piece, and that the technology to harvest Wi-Fi will be released soon after.

To read more and see the video go to : http://www.ohgizmo.com/2010/01/09/ces2010-rca-airnergy-charger-harvests-electricity-from-wifi/

Salt and Paper Battery May One Day Replace Lithium Batteries

Salt and Paper Battery May One Day Replace Lithium Batteries
A new thin-film battery has electrodes made of polymer-coated paper and an electrolyte made of salt-soaked paper. A laboratory prototype shows the cell pressed between glass slides and packaged in an aluminum pouch.
Salt and paper battery can be used in many low-power devices, such as medical implants, RFID tags, wireless sensors and smart cards. This battery uses a thin-film which makes it an attractive feature for many portable devices that draws a low current.

At Uppsala University in Sweden, researchers have developed a flexible battery made of two inexpensive materials: cellulose and salt. The cellulose is derived from a polluting algae found in seas and lakes. The algae's walls contain cellulose that has a different nanostructure, which gives it 100 times the surface area.

The battery is made by coating the paper, made from this cellulose, with a conducting polymer and inserting a salt-solution-soaked filter paper between the paper electrodes. Chlorine ions travel from the batteries positive terminal to the negative terminal while current is produced in the external circuit by the flow of electrons. The battery can be recharged in tens of seconds because the ions flow through the thin electrode quickly. In comparison to a lithium battery that would take 20 minutes to recharge.

The salt and paper battery is still in the early stages of development as compared to other thin-film technologies. For a battery to be cost effective you need to able to obtain the material at relatively low cost and have a good manufacture process in place. The battery could be produced commercially in about three years and made available to distributors.

Read more at: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23472/?a=f

Paper thin Printable batteries with no outer metal casing

Paper thin Printable batteries with no outer metal casing

Power Paper printable batteries will work exactly like a traditional battery, but it will be nearly as thin as a piece of paper. A Power Paper cell can generate 1.5 volts of electricity, which is about the same output as a watch or calculator battery.

It's amazing to watch as computers and other everyday electronic devices become thinner and thinner.
Yet, as new technologies are slimming down the size of electronic devices, power supplies have not slimmed down at the same pace. For a long time, batteries were bulky and heavy. Now, a new cutting-edge battery is revolutionizing the field. It is thinner than a millimeter, lighter than a gram, and can be produced cost-effectively through a printing process.

Power Paper, an Israel-based company, has recognized the need for a thinner power source that will not only power electronic devices, but also fit into disposable devices like games, greeting cards, smart cards, luggage tags and some medical devices. The near future promises to bring us books that will be filled with digital paper, which will display the text of any book we wish to read. Embedded in this ink will be the components of tiny, paper-thin batteries.

A Power Paper cell will be 0.5 millimeters thick, and several cells can be used in combination to provide more power. Here's how it will work:
• A zinc and manganese dioxide (MnO2) -based cathode and anode are fabricated from proprietary inks. In a battery, the cathode refers to the positive terminal and the anode refers to the negative terminal.
• Standard silkscreen printing presses are used to print the batteries onto paper and other substrates.
• Power Paper batteries are integrated into production and assembly processes of thin electronic devices.

It was developed by a research team led by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Baumann of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS in Chemnitz together with colleagues from TU Chemnitz and Menippos GmbH. “Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each,” states Dr. Andreas Willert, group manager at ENAS.

Because ink is used to produce Power Paper, the batteries are considered dry, and don't need the metal casing that conventional batteries do to contain harmful, toxic chemicals. This lack of casing allows electronics manufacturers to utilize the power source in many shapes and sizes.

Read more at: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/power-paper2.htm
Or at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12932-nanotube-tangles-power-printable-batteries.html