Why Digital Clothing Won’
t Need Batteries
For wearables to really take off, we’ll need powerful and
sophisticated devices that are lightweight, elegant, and small enough to be
worn as accessories—or embedded into the fabric of our clothes. But what about
the batteries?
Wearable devices are likely to be always on, running in the
background to wirelessly send and receive updates, as well as perform more
power-sucking tasks like running apps or streaming video. To keep the wearer
from having to juice up at an outlet every few hours, manufacturers are going
to need to find some smart solutions for powering these devices.
A burgeoning industry in energy-harvesting fabrics and
sensors seeks to capture the ambient energy all around us to make wearables
work smarter, not harder. One expert is Professor Joanna Berzowska, chair of
the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in
Canada, who has been developing interactive electronic fabrics that do exactly
that by capturing and storing energy from the human body.
“Our goal is to
create garments that can transform in complex and surprising ways--far beyond
reversible jackets, or shirts that change color in response to heat. That’s why
the project is called Karma Chameleon,” says Berzowska. The major innovation of
this research project is the ability to embed these electronic or computer
functions within the fiber itself: rather than being attached to the textile,
the electronic components are woven into these new composite fibers. The fibers
consist of multiple layers of polymers, which, when stretched and drawn out to
a small diameter, begin to interact with each other. The fabric, produced in
collaboration with the École Polytechnique’s Maksim Skorobogatiy, represent a
significant advance in the development of “smart textiles.”
Unfortunately, it’ll be another 20 to 30 years before we’ll
actually be able to manufacture clothing with these composite fibers. However,
Berzowska’s prototypes allow designers to start envisioning how such clothing
might look and behave, paving the way for T-shirts that double as mobile phone
chargers or shape-shifting garments that react to a particular environmental
setting or situation.
Several other research-stage energy-harvesting devices were
recently displayed at the Printed Electronics Europe 2013 conference in Berlin.
The trade show portion of the conference featured everything from
vibration-powered sensors to photovoltaic fabrics.
Perpetuum‘s
Vibration Energy Harvester (VEH) is a wireless sensor that gets attached to
rotating components, such as wheel bearings, on trains. Cleverly, the device
both measures and is powered by mechanical vibration. It also measures
temperature, and it wirelessly transmits the results to the train’s operator so
they can immediately spot a failure in its early stages.
Another EU-funded
project called Powerweave aims to create two kinds of fiber--one for harvesting
solar energy and the other for storing it--that can be woven together into one
self-contained system. This could theoretically be used to power soft sensors
in clothing, but there are far more large-scale applications in store.
According to
Christian Dalsgaard, founder of consortium member Ohmatex, the goal is to
create a fabric that can generate 10W per square meter. Once that is achieved,
he noted, there are “no limits to how big such a fabric can be made,” and a
100-square-meter piece of fabric would in theory be able to generate a kilowatt
of power.
Sounds promising. But once again, the research has a long
way to go before this tech will be ready to hit the market in the form of a
pair of jeans. Sure, watch manufacturers have been making use of kinetic and
photovoltaic energy harvesting for years to power self-winding wrist watches,
but the process gets considerably more complicated when you’ve got a Mac Mini
in there. Looks like we won’t be seeing these same techniques put to use in our
mobile phones or Nike FuelBands just yet, but this tech will be part of what
makes or breaks the wearable computing trend in years to come.
By: Julia Kaganskiy
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008818/tracking/why-digital-clothing-wont-need-batteries
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