The Next Generation of Smart Fabrics

Almost every gadget you can think of is now going smart, Phones, watches, and even homes. I a bid to expand the technical horizons, researchers are looking for ways to make smart clothing. To do that, they need a smart fabric that can conduct electricity, but the textiles they’ve come up with thus far don’t breathe well and are rigid.

However, a team of researchers from Germany’s University of Bayreuth and China’s Donghua University and Nanjing Forestry University have found a way to produce electrically conductive textiles that behave more like the ones we’re used to wearing. Through a special production process, they have found that they can create a nonwoven material that was very good at conducting electricity without compromising on comfort. The team didn’t insert metal wires into a textile after it was already made, unlike the process used to produce most smart fabrics. Instead, they used a modified version of classical electro-spinning — a process that has been used to create nonwovens for many years — to combine short electro-spun polymer fibres with tiny silver wires in a liquid. This mixture was then filtered, dried, and heated for a brief time to produce the smart fabric. The material has a number of applications, for example, sensors embedded into athletic attire could track fitness or health metrics and relay them to a paired device, a piece of clothing could be outfitted with solar cells that convert sunlight to warmth, heating up the garment on a cold day, or a pair of pants could charge the smartphone stowed in their pocket.

Not just that, the fabric can also be used as the seat covering on a plane or in a car. Passengers could charge their devices without leaving their seat. In short, anything that incorporates this fabric will get a “smart” bump.